Howlin' Wolff's Twisting & Turning

                                       Howlin’ Wolff’s Twisting & Turning

1987

Summer: Attended Radcliffe Publishing Course, a job fair at The New Yorker, where Graydon Carter  (who coined “short fingered vulgarian”) & Kurt Anderson offered me a job at SPY (not having a Lampooner’s bank account, I declined). Turned 25.

Fall-Winter: SPORT paid a living wage (deplored the instant shallow expert nature of magazines), jumped to Raines & Raines Agency, and found my home at Curtis Brown Ltd., world’s oldest and largest literary agency.

1989

Peter Rutten helped create Electric Word in Amsterdam with Louis Rossetto & Jane Metcalfe.

1990

August: Michael Wolff imported Peter from Holland to NYC. My mentor, Peter Ginsberg, President of Curtis Brown Ltd, signed them a month after I moved to SF. They wrote Where We Stand. I started my agency and became agentnazor on AOL & the Well. Turned 28.

1991

My fledgling company sold Rough Magic by Lowell Cohn for a six-figure sum.

1992

I met WiReD founder’s Louis & Jane, signed the Digerati before it was a word. Turned 30.

1993

 WiReD debuted. No NYC editor had email. Michael signed with Wylie, “the Jackal”.

 1994

 “Net, you cannot own the word NET!” I screamed at my screen. That was how Michael entered my headspace. I’d sent Net Chick to Michael & Peter’s NetGuide packaging company for Carla Sinclair of bOING bOING. Michael sent a cease and desist email. I told Carla to ignore it. Peter Ginsberg represented their contract with Random House. Michael couldn’t incite fear in this apprentice. Net Chick sold to Henry Holt.

1995

Louis and Jane hired Peter to start the book division for WiReD: Hardwired. 

July: I met Peter for lunch to discuss Salon columnist Andrew Leonard’s book, BOTS, which Hardwired bought. Peter & I began to date.

September: Peter confessed; A) He wrote the c&d letters, impersonating Michael, to my agency, B) He was married and divorcing.

1996

September: Google launched.

October: Michael & wife Allison Anthoine, Carla & husband Mark Frauendfelder, and 121 others came to our wedding in Maine. Louis & Jane sent their regrets. WiReD attempted going public.

1997

Peter and I appeared as characters in Carla’s novel Signal to Noise (which I'd sold to HarperCollins).

1998

April: Michael came to Noe Valley, met our infant daughter.

Wolff’s Burn Rate earned snarky reviews. I taught at writer’s conferences from Maui to Miami.

 August: WiReD sold to Si Newhouse for $90 million dollars. Hardwired expired. Michael became a columnist for New York with a six-figure salary and offered Peter a 1/3 to edit it.

November: We signed a purchase and sale for a house in Newton, MA.

December: In the Netherlands for Christmas, Michael emailed Peter. The editing gig ended. “Poof” went the Newton house. Michael became Mr. Burning Bridges in my book.

2000

We had a son. Peter scorched through several startups.

2002

Michael won awards at New York. We moved to the Burbs of Boston. Louis & Jane invested in chocolate, the futurists Gold. Shrank my client list. Began to teach English. Turned 40.

2004

Michael tried to buy New York from PRIMEDIA and failed.

2005

Sold the last book I adored: Elephant’s Secret Sense by Caitlin O’Connell (which I sold to Free Press). Graydon hired Michael as the first Media Columnist for Vanity Fair.

2008

Michael became columnist at The Industry Standard. His muckraking biography of Rupert Murdoch secured his seat as a go-to TV-interviewee. Louis and Jane opened a chocolate factory: TCHO.

2009

Allison learned that Michael had filed for divorce on Page Six of the New York Post and summarily evicted him from their Upper Eastside condo. Peter spent less time at home.

2010

Michael became the Editor at Adweek. Allison refused to grant him a divorce. We’re in Holland for the last time as a family.

2011

Adweek fired Michael. Peter skipped family events. My sister died.

2012

Winking at Lonesome George, I achieved a girlhood goal. He died two months later. So did my marriage. Turned 50.

2013

Our divorce finalized. Peter bought a condo with his girlfriend.

2015

Michael’s Television is the New Television was transparently self-serving and slammed.

I singlehandedly took 13 students to Australia/New Zealand/Hawaii.  Wooed by a software writer.

2016

Peter married for the 3^rd time. Louis Kickstarts a book.

I spent two weeks sailing with my boyfriend (one kid free).

2017

Jane founds Neo.Life: “Neobiological Revolution.”

2018

Michael’s Fire and Fury: dedicated to his girlfriend and their child. Allison residuum wife. Considering relinquishing software-sailor. Louis' memoir, Change is Good arrived in my mailbox inscribed: To Karen ~ who was there at the beginning. Turned writer.

My Dream Date

My Dream Date                                                                      16 January 2018

The sun was shining brightly through the skylights in the sun room off the kitchen. One stream blazed down upon the New York Times my Dutch husband sat reading. I briefly considered sitting beside him, but I’d had another dream and abandoned the notion. Cicadas filled the air with their mournful alarm.

As I continued to stand, my dog began circling, hoping this would result in a walk in the woods. It was Sunday morning after all, our standing hiking day. She looked at my feet, saw no Keens or Chacos, and decided to settle on to the couch, beneath a wall of windows, until that condition was remedied.

For six months I'd been trying to have a date with my husband.  Our fourteen year old daughter even offered to babysit her 11 year old brother for a "date night.” But no date was made. It was June 2012. He was acting as a dutiful husband, but not an engaged friend or stimulated lover. The post-menopausal lubrication device, I'd been prescribed the previous summer, had never been test-driven.

So here I stood, another Sunday morning, after a sexless Saturday night. I asked the same question of him that I'd been asking every month since my sister died in October.

"Are we ever going to be intimate again?" came out of my mouth as a sigh. 

He usually would answer, "Of course", or "Sure", or a slow and patient, "Yessss." 

But this time he answered distractedly as he folded the Sunday Times into his lap and exhaled, "I don't know."

"Finally, you're being honest," and I added, "I want a divorce."

He didn't miss a beat, although I swear the cicadas ceased for a second when he asked, "Can't we have an open marriage?"

The facial composure he usually lost when he was emotional, turning it into a rubbery mask, only relaxed at his mouth. His gray eyes drooped downward. It dawned on me that he'd already been living that reality for some time.

When my mind processed all that had just been uttered, I said as quietly and as steadily as possible, "If you can even ask me that question, then you don't know me at all." 

Being intimate to me was a package deal: sex, emotion, spirit, a shared history, humor and love. To him it meant sex and secrets. I'd suspected for years that he'd been having an affair.

In February while in Florida with the kids, and having left my dog at the farm, it was reported that my husband hadn't come home for many nights in a row. My friends wanted to hire a private eye.

For over a year, I'd had a recurring dream in which my husband approached a bar where I was waiting to be served. He saddled in beside me, without acknowledging me. Looking towards the direction he came, I'd see a woman with short fine dark hair and a pretty moon face. We'd lived together for eight years in San Francisco, and the Boston burbs for ten; he often protested, unsolicited, his distaste for Asian beauty.

Blindly, I put on my Chacos, which started the dog woofing and spinning towards the back door. By this point my husband was still sitting, but his dull expression had shifted to alarm, as he awoke to the idea that I wasn't acting angry or pleading, but rather remained composed and self-assured.

“I'm taking the dog for a short walk. After breakfast we can hike around Great Hill and discuss how to proceed, out of earshot of the kids.”

As I walked up the well-worn path and into the Arboretum, a thought repeated, when do you know your marriage is over?

What my soul had known for years, my brain no longer denied. As my dog and I rounded the half way mark on the trail, I felt a calm and girlish confidence that had been missing since my sister’s death. 

Deep in my bones I'd answered her last question to me, "When are you going to do something about Peter?" 

I remember exactly how the mottled light filtered onto the forest floor.  How the summer grass was overtaking the winter's compost. An answer kept echoing through the trees and above the reedy buzzing of the birds and bugs. The reply to my departed sister's question and my own were answered simultaneously: "Now." 

Mid-June 2013 the divorce was final and Peter would announce that he was buying a condo with the Hong Kong woman of my dreams.