Introduction

“If I had given it much thought, I might have hesitated to marry a man for whom at the age of 45 much of the past was too painful to consider--for either of us. Truthfully, thought had little to do with it.  Instinct did--the instinct to seize a sure and ebullient happiness or go down trying.” Falling in love is arguably the greatest risk and leap of faith any of us take.  There’s no guarantee for future happiness, no protection from the ugly scars of the past, no shield from tragedy--this powerful memoir reminds us why we bother. At a lakeside café in the summer of 1988, 31-year-old Glenda Burgess is sitting across from 44-year-old Kenneth Grunzweig and falling in love. Then Ken confesses that he has already been widowed twice, under harrowing circumstances. This tragic past, the age difference, Ken’s emotionally scarred teenage daughter--all might be enough to send anyone running, but Glenda believed in her instincts, believed more than anything that this lovely, generous man would shape her life. And Ken, who with his heartbreaking losses had long said that he’d given up on love, came to share a sense of their romantic destiny. The two embark on the sort of love affair that many of us don’t believe exist anymore--a grand romance that buoys them through the birth of two kids and fifteen magical years of marriage until tragedy strikes again in the form of a shadowy spot on Ken’s lung. The journey that follows will test their resilience and strengthen their devotion. The Geography of Love is a book about believing in first instincts and second chances. It is a poignant exploration of the depths of the human heart and our ability to love and to trust no matter the obstacles. It is a reminder that “real” life is always richer, stranger, and more extraordinary than fiction.

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Excerpt

Physicists say we are made of stardust. Intergalactic debris and
far-flung atoms, shards of carbon nanomatter rounded up by
gravity to circle the sun. As atoms pass through an eternal revolving
door of possible form, energy and mass dance in fluid
relationship. We are stardust, we are man, we are thought. We
are story.

“It's always a story, my girl,” my father told me one summer
evening when I was young. “Falling stars, rings in a tree
trunk, the river as it swells by, all stories.”

We were camping in the wilderness north of Vancouver,
Washington, along the pebble shoals of the Lewis River. It
was an hour after sunset, and the sky was deepening to an
inky lavender at the edge of the black canopy of trees. We
crouched beside the water, washing up after a quick dinner of
cowboy stew. I asked him what made stars shoot. At nine
years old, I was ready for real explanations, heavy truth, clues
and answers to bigger mysteries than long division. My father
had studied physics as a young man. I knew he would take my
question seriously.

He reached behind him to loosen a flat river stone and
skipped it out across the burbling rapids. Please, I begged
silently, tell me the truth. I knew with deep inner conviction
that the way my father answered my question would somehow
affect the way I asked and answered questions the rest of my
life.

He tossed out another stone as he considered the darkening
sky.

“Just a bit of chance and chaos, Sunshine,” he said.
“Atoms that dance.”

I think back to that long-ago conversation as I ponder the
effects of luck and disaster on the human heart. A child then,
I had no real awareness of human fragility, but I absolutely
knew shooting stars pirouetted across the universe. Life, my
search for truth, seemed dusted by a dash of magic.

Only now in the wake of fortune, do I truly understand.



Part One

Quintessence

summer, 1988.

I awoke to the sound of the unfamiliar. Disturbed by the rustle
of feathers and harsh caw of a crimson and teal parrot
perched on the balcony railing four feet from my nose. The
bird sidled along the railing toward the balcony patio table,
eyeing the remainders of a late-night fruit plate. A brilliant
green slug curled at the bottom of an empty champagne glass.

I lay still, coming slowly awake, registering another unfamiliar
sound: the muffled snores of the man sleeping beside
me. The sheets were crisp, expensive linen-hotel sheets. And
the bright sunlight streaming in through the filmy drapes was
the hot sun of Rio de Janeiro. The man was my lover. I was
thirty-one years old, and this was happiness. I had nothing to
compare it to, but you know the sweet from bitter, and this
was most definitely sweet.

I slipped out of the sheets careful not to disturb Ken and
pulled on his dress shirt from the night before, walking
through the sliding glass doors to the balcony. A breeze salty
and cool whipped in from the sea, carrying the lush green
smell of the jungles and bluffs that shouldered the white sands
of Ipanema. The beach was visible from our room, a scimitar
of glossy heat that ended in a sparkling sea, rimmed by high
rises and hotels, exotic gardens as far as the eye could see.

I hugged his shirt close, inhaling the musk and sweat of
the man, memories of thrilling guitars and Latin drums, the
salsa dancing of the night before. Who travels an entire continent
in order to salsa dance in Rio? Ken Grunzweig. “Nothing
comes from nothing, nothing ever could”-the phrase
from “Something Good” by Oscar Hammerstein drifted into
my head and I hummed the lyric with a smile, flicking a rind
of kiwi toward the parrot now hovering in the tree canopy below.
My grandfather had sung the song to me as a child. He
and my grandmother, on one of their periodic visits east to
New York, had booked in at the Plaza, picking up tickets to
Mary Martin in The Sound of Music. Broadway, 1959. I was
not yet three at the time, but I remember the song, the way
Grampa would twirl me and plant a big kiss on my neck as he
sang, “Somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have
done something good.”

I looked back over my shoulder at the man sleeping rumpled
under the sheets, one arm flung over his forehead in vulnerable
disregard for the world. For our many mistakes, the
unexpected tragedies, the sadnesses rounded with time, life
had produced the unfamiliar. Something good.


* * *
If you were to ask me what three things I know to be true of
life, I would tell you these three: what you dreamed of yourself
at fourteen reflects your purest wish; don't marry the first
person you kiss; and all the great questions bounce back
from God.

Fourteen is the first time we ever really ask our future
selves, “What do I want to be?” and the self answers back,
pure and free of rationalization. And love. Romance plops the
macaroni salad right beside the ambrosia. Grandmothers tell
us not to marry first crushes, unless we're the type of person
who has only ever liked bologna sandwiches and always will.
And while the question of God himself frames the universe,
the great mysteries exist in the human heart, unsolved. What
is faith, intuition, if not human sonar-hope that pings the
universe, mapping life? Sometimes gut instinct is the only way
to answer the big questions for ourselves.

I've learned to listen for the echo of small answers.
My father taught me that science was the puzzle play of
God, that the mysteries and theories of all creation were understood
in levels of revelation, degrees of understanding.
There was no wrong answer, but there were inadequate questions.
The scientific path to God, my father believed, was the
pursuit of “Why?”

I grew from a child to a young woman, and the question
“Why?” seesawed for dominance within my life with the
bleakness of “Oh well.” Short on answers but long on questions,
I learned to protect myself, to avoid the complicated detours
in favor of more well-traveled paths. For me, these paths
were particularly barren in matters of the heart. Dating the
guy sitting next to me in class, on the subway, in line at the
Department of Motor Vehicles, I encountered a profound lack
of imagination and magic.

Needless to say, I made a pretty good hash of things learning
about love. I know now that first loves are scooped from
reflecting pools, mirroring back to us, as the cool waters re-vealed
to Narcissus, how greatly we yearn to perceive ourselves
as lovable. The self, in its innocent quest to survive,
takes no prisoners. I think back to the sweet high school boyfriend
who just seemed to like me, the pothead intellectual in
college whose sense of independence taught me to think for
myself, the business graduate student from Wyoming who
stepped in and kept the world steady after my father died.
What was wrong with me? Why were they all so good and so
not right?

Eventually I constructed a layered exoskeleton, a coral
reef instead of a life. The structure was there, but the essence
was missing.

Quintessence: the essence of a thing in its purest and
most concentrated form. Quinte essence. The fifth and highest
element in an ancient and medieval philosophy that permeates
all nature and is the substance composing the celestial
bodies. Stars are not quintessence, but space, believe the
physicists, must be. Quintessence, like faith, remains unproven:
a deductive belief. A scientific theory suspended between
the idea of dark energy, the static glue thought to be
three-quarters of the universe, and dark matter, the inevitable
clump and form of structure within these fields. Quintessence
was the possibility of spark, dynamic vibration suspended at
varying levels within time and space.
The smallest bombardment might jostle us from lax energy
to subtle vibration. Possibility was everywhere.
Possibility dipped me over his arm last night on the salsa
floor, requested one room key for two, snapped my thong as I
brushed my teeth at the sink.


* * *
Bronzed and athletic in pressed khakis and a white shirt unbuttoned
at the neck, Ken waved over a cab. Brazilian conga
music spilled out of the open windows as the Land Rover
pulled over to the curb. Ken lifted our bags into the taxi and
we tumbled in, reaching for sunglasses against the noontime
glare.

“Good-bye Rio.” I smiled back through the palm avenues
of the Intercontinental Hotel as the taxi pulled away from the
curb.

“Where to now?” I asked. I really didn't know. This was
the kind of mystery I loved best.

“Argentina.” Ken smiled, in his dark shades every inch
the movie star.

“What's in Argentina?”

“The tango.”

Red Wagon

In the summer of 1987, the year before I met Ken, I returned
home to visit with my mother on her small farm in the Palouse
Hills of eastern Washington. I flew in from Washington, D.C.,
on the red-eye, taking a long weekend away from my management
analyst work at the State Department.

An ache had settled into my life in the capitol city. I felt
confused and uncertain about the goals I had set out vigorously
to achieve and now found so wanting. I had a career in
the government, traveled the world, and lived with a hole in
the center of my being that ambition could not fill. My instincts
were in disarray. Life felt tenuous. I wanted something,
a nameless something, that mattered. What was central to
work, to life, to love?

Unraveling these threads backward, I began to think
about my childhood.

Seeking comfort or something like wisdom from the
woman who was the only constant in my life, I left behind
Washington, D.C.'s sweltering humidity, and with it my naive
failures navigating bureau politics and the ex-boyfriend who
would rather drink than be with me. I would visit with my
mother and try to forget that I could see every exact day of
my unfolding life from where I stood today.

I felt a fierce loyalty to my mother, but she was also my
central conundrum, a question with a conjectural answer. The
terrain between us was defined by conflict and tumultuous
consequence. We lived in a constant state of one influencing
the other, bound by the act of observation and intention. I admired
her but could not comprehend her reasoning. I rebelled
from her law but sought her approval.

The farm marked the great divide in the timeline of my
childhood. What formed me, and what drove me away. It had
been several months since my last visit, on the somber occasion
of my grandfather's funeral. My grandfather had been the
cornerstone of strength in our family, his rich Scottish laugh
the joyous bell tone of our happiest family gatherings. His decline,
in the wake of burying my grandmother, had clearly
been a very great burden for my mom. She lived for her parents;
one of the oddities of her nature I never fully understood.
Most people lived forward through their lives, growing
and changing in the company of their spouses and children,
celebrating the next generation of grandchildren to come. My
mother lived backward. Childhood was the only song in her
ear. Her parents were her identity, her sense of security.

We are autochthonous, formed of the familial earth. Was
my mother becoming my sense of security?

In my child's eye, my mother opened and closed the curtain
on love. Watching her, I observed what it meant to be
married and happy, what it meant to be married and not, and
what it meant to be alone, living with something in between. I
learned that good things that came together might also break
apart, and that the joy of loving might ultimately total less than
the pain left behind.

My mother held the lead role in her own two-part play.
Act I Mom was the Beautiful Blonde swirling on the arm of
her officer, my dad. There were cocktail parties and muggy
summer evenings. Backyard barbecues I watched in shorts
and flip-flops from the top step of any of an endless succession
of look-alike bungalows on military air force bases.
Young and energetic, Mom organized the endless military relocations,
aced real estate, packed and unpacked her wedding
china. Life was both adventurous and magical. I remember as
a child of four or five, watching my parents ready to leave for
a Christmas ball. Enchanted, I reached up to touch the stiff
undernetting of my mother's scarlet cocktail dress, thrilled at
the sparkling rhinestones on her red high heels. She had her
hand curled around my father's arm, dark and handsome in
his uniform, smelling of Old Spice. Act I Mom seemed always
to be laughing.

The last move my mother organized for the family, the
last house she shipped boxes to, was here, the home in eastern
Washington. A prolonged decoupling had occurred in my
parents' lives somewhere between the Officers Club and the
farm: My father's drinking worsened, initiating a period of
forced smiles and declined social invitations, late-night arguments
in the basement family room on the other side of my
bedroom wall. Moving back west from suburban Maryland
and buying the farm represented the last effort my parents
made to save their marriage.

At eight I didn't comprehend what was happening, but it
was clear something was. The magic was splintering. I responded
as any child might, I suppose. I loaded up the red
wagon with my white, long-eared stuffed dog and a box of
Cheerios and ran away. When my father caught up with me
three blocks from home, heading toward the highway, he bent
down, took the handle of the wagon away, and asked, “Where
were you going, out here like this?”
Back to how we were before, I remember thinking.

Eventually my younger brother, Tim, and little Judy were
to follow my example. It wasn't until the State Patrol knocked
on our door, informing my parents they had picked up Tim
and Judy walking along the Interstate, that the red wagon was
decommissioned.

An American landed on the moon; Richard Nixon resigned.

Act II Mom emerged, the Lady Rancher. Gone were the
golf clubs, the party dresses. In their place a collection of motley
horses and whitewashed wooden jumps hammered together
by my father, a riding ring of soft spring mud. Each year,
orphaned lambs to be bottle-nursed were brought down by the
neighboring farmer, the lambs soon dead of milk disease. Each
lamb was a love affair, each death inconsolable. Stray dogs
wandered to the house and seemed to stay, and just as unpredictably
vanished the nights the coyotes hunted. The beginnings
and endings of connection felt rough and random.

My father slid deeper away. Somewhere in the military,
between Greenland and the Pentagon, his quiet nature had
dulled into a vodka haze. The detox centers failed and the
last-ditch move to eastern Washington, from military to academic
civilian life, seemed to remove what vestiges of his self-discipline
remained. What my mother demanded my father
do for love became what disillusionment did to love. The
fighting between my parents grew harsher, and the empty hills
only magnified our isolation. There were four of us after
Helen was born, and what as children we might have wanted
or needed fell away. We were casualties of war.

Within two years, my father was gone. The ensuing di-
vorce battle crossed six states, the bitterness vitriolic and invasive.
A teenager, I saw that love could fail, and even within
families, bludgeon hearts. Visitations, loyalties, even the mention
of my father's name, became conflicts. Tim and Judy, and
Helen starting kindergarten, were moved to another school
district. I took the bus alone to the old school where “everybody
knew us.”

My mother stopped answering the phone and answering
questions. She worked strange small-town jobs, and of necessity,
was often gone. At night, when I made dinner for the five
of us, it was either fish sticks or a 49-cent tub of beef liver
from the Safeway, fried crisp in a pan with white onions, rice
with a dollop of margarine, and reconstituted dried milk,
sometimes with the lumps still in it.

My younger siblings learned to love the farm, the apple
tree, the orphaned animals. Tim, tall and sunburnt like the
late summer wheat, made friends with the other farm-town
boys, getting into fast cars and Star Trek and baseball. And although
five years apart in age, Judy and Helen, leggy and
freckled in matching pigtails, seemed identical in their love for
the creatures that came to live in our barn.
My mother found the peace she craved, finally, in a life
she commanded alone.

I was the one unable to adapt. I missed our Act I life. I
missed my father's quiet hands and crinkled half smile. I
missed hitting the streets with the neighborhood kids, romping
through the green city parks, how we shrieked and doorbelled
at Halloween. I missed swim team. French in the
second grade. School trips to the Smithsonian. In this treeless,
blustery, ice- and mud-covered farm country, the pride of
school science was the awed distribution of a frozen cow's
heart. My life was over. I knew it. I put my head on my desk
and plotted my escape.

In high school I realized college was my way out. I
learned French and world politics, took Spanish and German,
captured the state debate trophy. With a check for the application
fee mailed from my dad in Indiana, I applied to the best
state university that would take me, and to which I could apply
without having to enlist my mother's support. Mom, lying
on the floor in the darkened living room between afternoon
shifts working the phone banks at the sheriff 's office and
night shifts at the nursing home, did not feel like telling college
officials the details of the travesty of her personal finances.
She wasn't filling in any forms, nothing thank you, go
away. The college money sent every year from my paternal
grandmother had been rerouted to farm taxes, and before
that, detox clinics. There wasn't a dime.

The faculty offered a scholarship, and I penciled in my Social
Security number to take out my first student loan. I had a
new bike from my Mom charged to my grandfather's store account,
a used typewriter from my dad. I was going to college.
The beginning of freshman year, fall term, Mom loaded
the kids into our teal Chevrolet station wagon and drove
across the state, unloading my boxes outside my dorm room.
She sent me off to the student cafeteria alone-my meals were
paid for-and fed the kids and herself from a one-dollar bag
of Dick's Burgers. That night my family slept in the back of
the car in the parking lot as I looked down from the empty
space of my seventh-floor room.

This was the only family I knew, and the last time I belonged
at home.


* * *
The farm felt unchanged, remote, and inescapable. Pulling up
in a rental car, I opened the chained gate and drove up the
long gravel road to the house. I relived again the shock of being
carted as a teen so abruptly into the country: into a life
without high school friends or activities, the end of piano lessons,
of track and debate club. A teenager marooned without
a car, surrounded by acres of wheat and buckets of horseshit.
Horses. So many horses. I might have wanted a high school
dance, or even a bookstore. My mom wanted horses.

The house and stable looked the same to me as they always
had, a bit more worn perhaps, but the pastures were
mowed and the house bore a new coat of brown stain and
green trim. Tim and Judy and Helen were grown, gone away
to work and college, but the old chicken coop was still outside
Tim's window, and the bees and horses still feasted on the
rotten apples at the foot of the old tree. My father had died,
and although the old arguments were gone, there remained a
blackened burn. For the last twelve years, my mother and I
had shared only the occasional visit, letter, or holiday card.

Standing near the four-stall barn in the hot August sun, I
watched Mom pull on her work gloves, boost an eightypound
hay bale across one hip and toss it down the low hill.
She clipped off the twine binding with a pair of needle-nose
pliers and forked apart the leaves of hay. Lifting two fingers to
her teeth and emitting a piercing wolf whistle, she brought the
horses up from the lower field. She was happy. You could see
it in her stance as she watched the horses nudge apart the
green alfalfa flakes.

“So I take it you don't approve of me leaving the government,”
I said quietly.

I jammed my hands in my jeans, squinting at her through
the direct sun. I felt as I had at twelve, tall and gawky, an ordinary
girl in a brown ponytail, wondering if my mom loved me.

Mom shrugged, stroking the neck of the old bay.

“Don't see why you would,” she said with a grunt. “Good
jobs are hard to find.”

But this wasn't about a good job.

“I've thought about writing. Trying seriously.”

Mom said nothing.

In a burst of sudden courage, I cleared my throat. “I'm so
lonely. Did you know that? Traveling all the time . . .”

“You've done all right.”

“I'm thirty, Mom. Thirty. Still hoping for a true love.”

I kicked a dirt clod.

“You should keep your job.”

“I know.”

My mother twisted slightly, shading her face with her
gloved hand. Her eyes were bright blue, nested in crow lines;
the muscles of her forearms tanned below the line of her old
blue T-shirt. Sighing, she poked the pliers into her back
pocket and bent to scoop the twine off the ground, balling it
in her hand as she headed back to the barn.

“Changing your life . . . well, different isn't necessarily
better.”
That's all she said. I collapsed inside.

“Look, Glenda . . .”

Her silhouette cast a long shadow down the slope from
above. I felt my body bend instinctively toward her, needing
so much.

“Thirty's young. You have time.”

You have time. The kindest thing she had ever said to me.
Reluctant, to be sure-anything emotional for her was. But
there it was, a mother telling a daughter to wait on hope.
One year later I was in Rio, in the arms of the man of my
dreams.

The Mystery of
Geography

Spokane was the unexpected thread that connected us.

Kenneth Grunzweig had relocated to Spokane in the
early fall of 1987, a new executive with a local technology
company. I resigned from the government, returning to Spokane
Christmas of that year with all my worldly belongings in
the back of my white hatchback, finding low-level work as a
tech writer with a local company. We met for the first time a
few weeks after the new year, meeting in the cheese section of
the Four Seasons Deli, a small grocer tucked inside an old
brick coffee roaster's building. Our hands collided reaching
into a cold case. His coat was bunched beneath his arm, and
he wore a pastel polo shirt, coral pink, the collar turned up.

Not from Spokane, I thought.

We exchanged smiles, and then I asked the clerk if she
carried Montrachet cheese. She gave me a blank look.
“I just asked that!” the guy in the polo said.

Still grinning, he remarked off-handedly that he was or-
ganizing an opera party at his house and needed something
special, a good cheese to accompany chilled Semillon wine.

“Opera? In Spokane?” I suppressed a chuckle. “Better
you should like Van Halen. Better yet, monster trucks are
coming to the coliseum.”

I smiled at Montrachet Guy and we parted ways.

* * *
Months later, walking the sandy spit along Lake Coeur
d'Alene on a hot, end-of-June afternoon, someone called out
my name and I turned around.

Montrachet Guy. And more darkly handsome than I remembered.

His entire face lit up in an infectious smile.

“Remember me? The cheese shop? I think we work together.
Ken Grunzweig.”

He extended his hand.

Of course I remembered him. But I had never connected
the face to the name. Each day I passed by the suite of executive
doors as I clocked in to my cubicle. Kenneth Grunzweig
was my boss's boss, a corporate vice president. In fact, rumor
had it he had been responsible for my hire against the advice
of the midmanager, who had his eye out for the lesser, lessthreatening
candidate, one that would not compete for his
job. Ken had flat out instructed the man to hire the best candidate
he could, and that happened to be me.

Still smiling, he invited me inside the cool resort lakeside
bar for a drink.

“So you're really not gay?” I asked. I laid my floppy straw
hat on the cocktail table, easing my feet out of my sandals and
tucking them under me in the roomy rattan chair.

“Say what?” His face crinkled.

“That's the rumor at the company. Pastel shirts and
pressed jeans? Last known origin-San Francisco?”

“My God, this is the provinces.” Laughing, Ken ordered
a bottle of Edna Valley chardonnay.

He impressed me as smart, that sexy kind of smart that
makes conversations lift across whole continents of subject
matter.

“So how did your opera party go?” I inquired, eyeing
him over the rim of my glass.

“Oh the fat lady sang, all right. Later seen having fries at
Dick's.” He referred to a popular drive-in greasy spoon.

The sunset over the lake washed into an indigo summer
night. The waitress, busting out of her white sailor hot pants,
came to the side of our table. She stooped low, lighting the
candle at our cocktail table. “Anything more for you, sir?”
She flicked her lashes at Ken, openly flirting.

“How about a large Caesar for two, and steamed clams?”
Ken looked at me for agreement.

I nodded. The bar had begun to fill with the boat crowd
straggling in from the docks.
“Not gay. Not married?” Ask early, especially with the
cute ones.

He began to shake his head, and then stopped. His blue
eyes darkened in the flickering light.

“Widowed, actually. Twice.”

“Whoa. Bad luck.” On both sides, I thought.

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“No! Look, I'm sorry. Sometimes I just blurt things. I
only meant that such a double loss doesn't seem fair somehow.
. . .”

“You're right.”

Without missing a beat, Ken moved on, refilling our
glasses. “You're in tech writing, correct? Formerly with the
government, if I remember rightly. Big career change. What
brought you here? Family? I've been here a year. My daughter,
Jordan, just finished high school. But she's back in California
with her boyfriend now.”

I could see this was the fresh wound, the one that still
caught him by surprise. Ken talked about California, how he
missed the sophisticated coastal culture, his bicycling friends.

“So what on earth brought you to Spokane?”

“One last attempt to give myself and my daughter a new
life-and she left.We see how well that worked.” He dipped a
piece of French bread in the clam sauce, took a bite, and
handed the rest to me. “Here, try this. The dill and wine
sauce is superb.”

One thought. I had one improbable thought. I was the
one to love this man. I recognized my future in the sparkling
eyes of this Californian, handsome as an Italian fourteenthcentury
Caravaggio with clam juice on his chin.

As the hour grew late, Ken touched lightly on his marriages,
describing his early first love and her tragic loss in a car
accident, and his later relationship with the woman who
would become his daughter's mother. Already a widower, Ken
had fallen in love for a second time with a stunning Choctaw
woman with shining coffee bean-colored hair. They settled in
Oakland, California, and a few years later, Jordan was born.
But the marriage remained a combustible union, and after
years of escalating arguments, Ken had finally moved out and
the couple filed for divorce.

Ken took a breath, leveling his gaze on me. “I don't know
why I'm telling you this. I never share this part of my life. It
gets a bit . . . grisly. Sure you really want to know?”
“Absolutely, if you care to share. You and I, we seem to
keep running into each other in the oddest places. If we're going
to be friends-”

“Brave girl,” he murmured. “Not everyone would.”

The facts were, as Ken had warned, unexpectedly brutal.
Prior to their divorce, Beckah was murdered: stabbed to
death late at night in their home in Oakland, December of
1981. The same charming Tudor cottage Ken had remodeled
by hand, laying in each decorative tile, painting the walls a
bright and cheery yellow.

“Murdered? Your wife was murdered?”

Ken flinched. The word itself inflicted pain.

“I'm sorry,” I said, fumbling for composure. “It's just-
shocking.”

The waitress slipped our tab across the table. The lakeside
bar had nearly emptied.

His voice soft, Ken explained that lacking any solid leads,
the detective in charge of the investigation had calculated
that the soon-to-be ex-spouse must have committed the
crime-the statistics always pointed to the family first. Despite
prominent evidence of a serial murderer in the area at the
time, the Oakland PD hounded Ken. Living under constant
suspicion had made his and Jordan's life an unending nightmare.
Ken was never formally charged, but neither was
Beckah's murder ever solved.

“Yet you stayed? In San Francisco, I mean?”

“No one was going to drive me out of town.” Ken's lips
tightened. “I was innocent. Innocent people stand their
ground.”

Ken described the fight to protect Jordan from the
trauma, and at the same time, clear his own name. Beckah's
family had turned bitterly against him, and unsuccessfully
sought custody of Jordan. One sister-in-law stalked Ken
through the streets of San Francisco, screaming accusations.

“You can only imagine.” He shook his head.
My throat grew dry and I fiddled with the last of the
chardonnay in the bottom of my glass, swirling it around and
around, avoiding Ken's eyes. My thoughts were racing. Whatever
are you getting yourself into? What if everybody is right
and he did murder his wife? You can't get interested in this
man. He's disaster in a great-looking package. And, you work
together! You need this job.

I glanced outside at the dock gaslights, noting how each
lamp cast brilliant golden ripples across the dark lake. I felt
suddenly unable to think. On the face of it, his story seemed
unbearably tragic, and yet he exuded genuine warmth, an infectious
love for life that appeared unstoppable in his determination
to live beautifully and as deeply as possible. Was he
mad, or merely the most complex and astounding human being
I had ever met?

I could barely breathe. I sipped my wine, feeling the
world as I knew it, shift.

Glancing up, I met the quiet ironic awareness in Ken's
gaze. I forced a smile. I felt both fear and free fall.

I believed in his innocence.

The atomic weight of the man was goodness. I simply
knew it. I felt as sure as I'd ever been in life, separating the real
from the unreal. It was intuition with the force of conviction.

“And your daughter? Losing her mother? How did she
cope?”

“Jordan? Jordan was Mommy's girl.”

Ken sketched out the years of trying to raise Jordan on his
own. It was a tough history for a kid.

The therapists he and Jordan visited in the aftermath of
the tragedy had blamed her seething adolescent anger and
frightening self-destructive behavior on one thing: tremendous
repressed grief. The therapists explained to a bewildered
Ken that his daughter needed to pin her traumatic
overwhelming loss on the one safe person in her life, her fa-
ther. Ken accepted this. He tried to both love her and contain
her escalating bouts of rebellion, to detach from her verbal attacks.

But nearly eight years later, things had not improved. Jordan
had placed herself beyond his reach, yet Ken wouldn't, or
couldn't, quit trying.

“Honestly?” Ken sighed, rueful. “Neither of us was much
good at the father-daughter thing. I was trying to restart my
own life and at the same time set ground rules for hers. Total
fiasco.” He shook his head, sliding his credit card over the
bill. “About five years after Beckah's death, I returned home
from a symphony date . . .”

He had opened his front door to discover two teenage
couples entwined on opposite ends of the sofa, necking in the
dark, bottles of vintage wine uncorked on the coffee table.
The couples broke apart as Ken flipped the lights on.

“Jordan! What are you doing?” Ken had demanded in
shock.

Jordan stood up, smoothing down her shirt. Across the
room, her girlfriend stared at the floor, her face flaming. And
two boys slunk out from where they had darted into the back
bedroom, making a beeline for the open door.

“Not so fast, boys!”

Ken collared the nearest and handed him the phone.
“First you call your father and tell him where you are. And
then you tell him what bottles of wine you have with you, because
these are most certainly not mine.”

The color drained from the teen's face as he blinked from
under a dark fringe of hair. He whispered into the phone, and
a deep voice on the other end exploded in anger, bellowing
out from the receiver: “Jackson, those are two-hundred-dollar
bottles of wine!”

The teenagers left moments later under the escort of their
parents.

“Well, Jordan?” Ken demanded of his sixteen-year-old
daughter, closing the front door.

“Well, what?” Jordan smarted back. “Like you haven't
been out doing something?” Her eyes darted toward the edge
of her father's rumpled shirt collar, unbuttoned and bent up at
the back, the telltale flush still on his cheek. “Dad?”
I said nothing.

“I tried the best I could.” Ken appeared tired suddenly.

“Well, she's made a choice, and it seems to be final. It's just
me now.”

Unfinished business, closed circles.

One thing I knew for certain, what tears apart a family is
never final.


* * *
Two days later, Ken called me at home and invited me to the
movies. There was both hesitation and intent in his voice.
In equal, measured tones, I said yes. We drove to the theaters
on the far side of town. And I said yes again, to long
weekends at a distant lake resort, followed by a holiday in
Napa, discreet vacations to Europe, South America.

We met, we danced, and we loved.

We lived within our own moment in time, knowing how
genuinely improbable it was that we should meet-Kenneth
Grunzweig, the Jewish boy from Cleveland, born in the
wartime forties, and me, the cold-war kid born on an air force
base in New Mexico, smack in the middle of the “duck and
cover” fifties.

Falling back and forth through geography and history, the
two of us had our feet firmly planted in different decades of
the last century.

Ken had come of age during the Bay of Pigs, doo-wop,
the Beatles, Kennedy, and Vietnam, while I walked to kindergarten
through snowdrifts outside the military base near
Rome, New York, The Jetsons painted on my metal lunch
box. Ken was already a senior manager in the financial district
in San Francisco when I graduated from high school in the
seventies, my bedroom wall taped with pictures of the Apollo
missions and the moon walk, the daily papers filled with details
of the Watergate scandal. On our family television-the
tube set my father had built from a kit newly replaced by the
big color console purchased on time payments from Sears-
Michael Jackson slid backward across the stage, his white
gloves flashing. Paper millions were made and lost on Wall
Street.

As children, Ken and I lived vastly different American
lives. While my brother and I swung from rope vines, playing
Tarzan in the Vanetti's backyard outside Andrews Air Force
Base, Ken and his brother jumped tenement roofs, dodging
alley gangs. Under broken street lights the handsome brothers
stole kisses off the Polish girls-fire-escape love-until a low
draft number shipped Ken from Ohio across the North Atlantic,
and into the company of military power generators and
remote Icelandic women.

In the days that followed, I learned more about Ken's past
as bits and pieces floated to the top of conversations-most
often in the quiet after making love, moments of sharing we
treasured as both safe and private. Ken seemed to need me to
know the absolute harshest facts, as if protecting himself and
me, by giving the worst up front. Where he was unwilling to
go, I did not push. I knew instinctively that some questions
had no answers, that some feelings had been simply boxed because
survival depended upon it.

It was so wide, the landscape of this man's life. The details
were sketchy, but their significance was unforgettable.
What I knew seemed far too much, and yet ultimately too little.
How do you know a heart? The life only tells the journey.

The littlest details accompany the biggest hurts. I learned
that after the air force Ken returned to California, and while
still in his early twenties, married his first love, a smiling girl
named Diana.Within the year, Diana was killed in a collision
with a drunk driver, a wreck that Ken survived. Devastated,
Ken lost himself in Mexico. He joined a traveling band, burying
his broken heart in jazz. He played nights without end on
a dented, second-hand flute for tourists on exquisitely beautiful
Mexican beaches. “Wasting away in Margaritaville” was no
joke for Ken. He was a man with an ache greater than the sum
of his being.

Returning from Acapulco to the United States after
thieves stole his flute, Ken met Beckah, his second wife and
Jordan's mother, at a cocktail party. Besides her dark beauty,
he had felt drawn to her because she understood all that he
didn't care to explain, as she herself had lost a spouse in the
Vietnam War. After Beckah was murdered, when Ken was in
his late thirties, his life was swept up in the scandal of a violent
crime that would haunt his every waking moment.

During Ken's years of heartache and survival, my naive
world was just unfolding. I lazed on a midwestern campus
green, listening to “Sugar Magnolia” and reading Rousseau.
After graduate school I moved to Washington, D.C., a bright-eyed
executive-in-training, an analyst with the U.S. State Department
bearing my first passport.

And I gave it all up to begin again at the beginning. Who
did I want to be, what did I want to do, who would be my one
to love?

Quintessence. I waited on the possibility of spark. My
one extravagant heart's desire to live large, to find love, to
know joy.

Ken arrived in Spokane looking for a new future. Me, I
was just passing through.
The mystery of geography is that you can both find and
lose yourself in latitudes familiar and strange. We stumbled
into romance with few questions, knew what was necessary to
know, and hoped, yes, hoped the best was yet to come.
... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

1. In her memoir's prologue, Glenda Burgess recalls the child-friendly explanation her father gave for shooting stars: “Just a bit of chance and chaos, Sunshine. Atoms that dance.” How do these images apply to love? Did this description of the universe prove true in her life?

2. Discuss the memoir's title. What does it mean to create a geography of love, mapping and describing its features? Where was love “located” for Glenda and Ken, both emotionally and on a map of the world? Which places and people have contributed most to your own geography of love?

3. What did Glenda's parents teach her about being a spouse and a parent? How did her father's downward spiral and her mother's withdrawal affect her expectations of life?

4. What accounts for the instincts that helped Glenda know Ken was her soul mate? What is the best way for a couple to know whether they are compatible? Should age differences matter? Besides chronology, how can age be measured in other ways, such as maturity and wisdom, or whimsy and innocence?

5. In what ways were Glenda and Ken both wounded souls when they met each other? What enabled them to forge such a deep trust? Is intense love always tempered by the equally intense risk of losing someone who means so much?

6. How did your impressions of Ken evolve throughout Geography of Love? How did the author's storytelling style create a vivid portrait of herself and of her beloved? Which scenes from your life would best create a portrait of you and those you love?

7. What turning points were marked when Beckah's true killer was identified? How had the lives of Ken, Jordan, and Glenda been affected by the shadow of that violent night, and the fact that the crime went unsolved for so many years? What theories had you formed about the murder while reading the memoir's initial chapters?

8. What was your first reaction to Ken's illness and diagnosis, as well as that of Glenda's mother, Louise? How did their experiences compare to that of other cancer patients you have known about? What did Ken's and Louise's stories reveal to you about the wrenching imprecision of treating this disease?

9. Did Glenda's siblings have anything in common with Ken's? What role did extended family play in creating stability as well as instability on both sides? What is the best way to navigate the tensions and the sometimes overwhelming generosity of extended family that often arise in the midst of a severe health crisis?

10. Were you surprised to hear Louise's version of events as she recalled her marriage? How did her perception of her past and her life compare to Glenda's images of growing up? Who “owns” the truth in the re-telling of a life?

11. Compounding the stress of Ken's illness was the issue of health-care costs and insurance. As Glenda described the frantic tabulations regarding her husband's coverage, what thoughts did you have about the economics of healthcare in America?

12. “I had learned to pray all wrong,” the author writes in “Ever You Fall.” “Real prayer, I understood, functioned in a unity of situation and awareness, a commune between the head and the heart.” How does her experience of spirituality shift throughout the book? What do she and Ken express about spirituality and its relationship to the physical world?

13. Louise and Ken chose opposing forms of treatment for their cancer, debating these approaches at a diner when they gathered after weeks of estrangement. Which treatment approach would you have favored? What are the limits and benefits of modern medicine?

14. As his illness progressed, Ken saw the ghost of his first wife, Diana. How did you interpret that scene? What are your beliefs about the process of departing from life, and the potential for interaction with those who have died? What did it mean to Ken to see his first love again after so many years? How had he processed the experience of loving three very different women, at three very different points in his life?

15. How do the memoir's closing images echo the words of the poem that forms the book's epigraph? What did Campbell McGrath's words signify to you?

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