But what this story is about — what it has always been about — is not the publications and premieres, not the professional triumphs, though these were real and hard-won and deserved. What it is about is the quality of the ordinary life they built.
It is about Tuesday mornings when the coffee was made and the light came through the Riverside Drive window and she was at her keyboard and he was at his desk and they were each in their own work and also somehow entirely together, the apartment holding both their solitudes in a way that neither of them had expected and both of them needed.
It is about the walks in the park in every season — the late-April blossoms and the July heat and the September turn and the January snow on the bare branches and the river doing what rivers do through all of it, indifferent and sustaining. It is about the soup dumplings place, and the bookstore on Broadway where they each always ended up in their own section and found each other twenty minutes later with their discoveries.
It is about Soo-Jin Park, who became the friend they shared, who made dark comedies about New York and baked too much and whose friendship was one of the particular gifts of the year. It is about Marcus Webb and his city dances, and the musicians Mara worked with, and the writers and academics and artists they accumulated, slowly, in the organic way that a life in a city accumulates people when you are paying attention.
It is about the sadness too, which did not vanish. His father's absence remained, would always remain. He thought of him often — on Saturday mornings when the sound of a lawn mower came through the window from the park, on Ohio Sundays when he called his mother, who was managing her widowhood with the practical stubborn grace that was her fundamental nature. He thought of him when he read the novel in its published form and found his father on every page, unnamed but present, the grief that had been the engine of it.
He had dedicated the novel to him. It seemed right. It seemed like the truest form of what the novel was for.
It is about the letters, which they kept writing even after they were in the same apartment, because Mara had been right that some things needed the slow hand and the paper, and which they left on each other's desks on the days when something needed to be said in that form. It is about the fact that even in the same small apartment, there were things better said in writing, and that this was not a failure of proximity but one of its particular gifts — the chance to say the thing carefully, to leave the evidence of the saying.