As my summer job as a forest pathologist neared its end, one of our sites required us to go down a loosely packed mix of dirt and rocks on the way to our designated dead tree. It was the sort of place you cannot really walk down. You just get down on one leg, and put the other out in front of you, and slide. This was a plot that took a long time to get to. We all did our individual jobs like the well oiled loosely organized machine we had developed into by then. Later as we were nearing our base camp at the end of the day, I noticed my wedding ring was gone. I checked to make sure I had not lost it in the jeep. I checked all my pockets. I asked if anyone had seen it anywhere. I then accepted that it had been pulled off my finger as I slid down the hill earlier and it was gone. There was absolutely no chance of getting it back. When I called my wife later that night, I told her about the ring. I thought she would be upset. She was not. She said we would talk about it when I got back home. Not that we would replace it. We would talk about it.
Just after that, we had a short holiday. My in-laws had invited me to a Giant-Dodger baseball game. It was a nice diversion. Of course, the Giants lost. On the way back up to Big Bear, the summer had one more try at killing me.
I was heading up into the mountains and found myself behind the same slow driver for quite a while. I decided that if I did not get around him, I would spend the rest of my life looking at his brake lights. I had a chance to get around him and took it. Passing was difficult due to heavy traffic coming back to the valley after the holiday. Within a couple of minutes, after I passed, I rounded a corner, and there was a long straight-away. The downhill lane was moving, but very slowly with rare spaces between. And, I noticed a car out in my lane, passing a bunch of them on the straight section.
I slowed down and got as far onto the shoulder as I could, aware of the chance the driver I had passed could plow into me as I attempted to avoid the downhill passer hitting me head-on.
Somehow, the passing downhill driver managed to force his way into the downhill traffic. He appeared terrified.
I pulled back into the uphill lane.
A mile or so further up the hill, I realized that car I had passed earlier wasn’t behind me. A bit further up from there, I saw an ambulance responding to a call with lights and siren. The downhill traffic was bumper to bumper, but my lane was clear. He used that. It made me wonder what had happened.
This return trip after the baseball weekend turned out to be one more close call in a seemingly never-ending list of close calls during this initial forestry job. A pretty close brush.
Maybe the summer had been trying to tell me something.
The drive home at the end of the job was uneventful.
And somehow, it came about that my wife and our friend (her co-worker) and I went to dinner shortly after I got home. The dinner was fine. I had stories. They had stories. How was it that he was there again (still)? I was beginning to feel like I should try to call a friend to get a date. Not for him, but for me. How is that for foreshadowing?
We were providing transportation that night. We dropped him off at his apartment. And, by dropping off, you might get the idea that we drove up, left the motor running as he got out, and we waited just long enough to see him go upstairs before we drove off to our own apartment. Normally, that might have been the way it should have gone. But not this time. He and my wife got out. (Huh?) They both stopped just close enough to the front of our car that I was not able to see higher than their shoulders. And then they hugged each other. It looked like a very close hug, and it was a long hug. I could only guess as to if there had been more to it.
She claimed later that it was just a friendly hug thanking him for all the time he had kept her company over the summer when I had been gone. Well, I had seen my share of friendly hugs, and this was about the friendliest hug I had ever seen her do to anyone other than me. I tried to let it go. She was right. He had helped her through the summer. I knew how lonely it had been for me. It had to be worse for her, still being around things that reminded her of me. I wish I had had someone to keep me from thinking too much about her. I hope this does not sound too bitter. At the time, I knew nothing for sure, but I was beginning to wonder how much comfort from a friend might be too much.
There were other things that seemed to be clues, if I had the eyes to see them, or the heart to accept them.
At home I noticed that all of the pictures that had me in them were put away. I asked her about that, and she said the only way to deal with me being gone was for her to convince herself that I was not around anymore, as in dead. I think she even used those words. She had to think of it as if I had died. And there had been numerous times I could have died if she really wanted to know those stories. It was just too hard for her to be reminded of me every time she went through the house.
I was completely the opposite. I wish I had had more pictures of her with me. Oh well. Everyone deals with stress differently. Some spend hours gazing longingly at photos. Some have affairs while the pictures stay in a drawer. And, I guess she is right. If I had been having an affair, the last thing I would have wanted to see, or to be seen by my co-affair partner, would be a snapshot or two of my wife.
Of course, this was not as simple as it seemed on the outside. It never is simple. I know this caused her a lot of stress in the end because she came down with a case of mono. All of that is still in the future though. I was back, and we seemed to be getting along just fine. I was happy, and I thought she was, too. She acted happy, anyway.
Then he invited us to go see a friend of his up east of Sacramento who had been building a log house. There was also some sort of a site in the area that my wife was interested in related to her masters’ research project. Her project had to do with the effect of smoke on retarding the growth of certain fungi. The graduate student she worked with on this project was to become an important figure in her future. The site was in a recently burned area that she wanted to survey.
We met her friend up there, and were introduced to the cabin builder. This turned out to be the most uncomfortable and the worst weekend of my life, up to that point. Exactly how it all came up, I am not sure I remember exactly. But early on, I realized my wife knew too much about the house and the area to have just been seeing it for the first time as I was. And, I was left alone a bit too much. I think our host must have mentioned something about this to me, like how good a sport I was to come up with them. Maybe he thought that they had already told me they were together. During this weekend I finally became aware of just how being friendly can become too friendly.
After we had gone to bed, I mentioned our host’s comments about being surprised to see me along on this trip. That was the start of officially marking the ending of our relationship.
I remember being up most of the night talking to her about what had gone on over the summer. It had all started innocently enough, for her anyway. They had gone to the beach just to do something as friends might do. I never went to any event anywhere with any woman, or even a friend who was not a woman either of the two summers I was away during my marriage, but that is just me. The only place I went socially that summer just happened to have been a baseball game with her parents. And they had probably known about everything at that point.
But, he and she went quite a few places, it seemed. Early on, they had talked about couples in general, and us in particular. And then, one thing led to another, and she suddenly was admitting to him that she had never enjoyed the more physical aspects of marriage- not at all. Not even one time. She did not even know that she was supposed to enjoy it. I guess, one thing led to more things, and suddenly, he was telling, and or showing her how to fix that. How is that for beating around the bush? This is a family-friendly blog after all.
In theory at this point, she was still intending to be with me. The problem was that I was not him. She was not able to put what she now was able to feel with and for him into the context of feeling it with me. She claimed that she still wanted to try. I told her the only way it would work was for her to no longer have any sort of physical relationship with him. If she wanted to make it work with me, it would have to mean that I was the only physical contact. Is that not a totally understanding attitude? I was not even sure it was a good idea for us to remain friends with him at that point, but I never brought that up.
She claimed she wanted to try to get past this, but she could not do it. Or she did not want to do it. ‘Can’t a person love more than one person?’ she would ask me. Sure you can. Love is limitless. But the physical expression of it is another thing, at least for me. That would have to be limited. This is one part of our relationship that I would not share with someone else. We spoke of divorce, but it was too soon to decide yet if it would come to that.
It was decided sooner than I ever would have believed. I think that a quick divorce had always been the plan. She just was giving me time to adjust to the idea. Divorce was the only solution after all. We made the initial arrangements, and started splitting up the household “things.” We duplicated what we would both needed. We packed it all up. I got my own apartment, and moved out. We told our parents. We told our friends. It was one last project we did together, as flawlessly as all of the others.
At this point, I started hearing things that friends or family had seen going on, and wondered about. My old forestry camp roommate had seen my wife on the back of a motorcycle with some guy while I was gone, on more than one occasion. And, my father had tried to call our apartment to check in with her and to see if she was OK, and not gotten through for a while. Then when he did, he was sure that he heard a guy in the background. Anyway, no one understood how the perfect couple could break up. What could I tell them? I was not really sure at that point myself. Why hadn’t she told me? Why was it so easy to tell someone else details of the most private portions of our life and how she felt, when she could not tell me?
We saw each other a few times right after I moved. It got too hard for both of us though. There was just too much baggage to act like we could go on as friends, knowing what had happened. Then she got sick, so I barely saw her after that.
By the following April, actually on April Fool’s Day, I received notice that our divorce was final. I remember actually getting the humor in that. Sometime in June, she sent me a copy of the invitation to her wedding, which had already taken place. I am not sure I really would have wanted to see the invitation if I had had a choice, but that is what she did. She sent that, with a couple of lines saying that she wanted me to know, but did not want me to find out from anyone else first. I doubt I even knew anyone else at that point who would have told me if they had known.
It is funny that one excuse for her having done what she did was that she felt trapped by being married. I guess marriage itself was not the real problem. It was that her marriage had been to me.
Memory is the Key 