Catalytic

It was a nighttime scene, and it seems like a dark tunnel, but that is only because the better part of 20 years has passed.  In reality it was a coastal redwood forest of the sort that is common to Northern California.  Recent events have reminded me of that evening, but the memory has always lingered.  Today, I do understand the tunnel, more or less, for I was in one for several years.  Dark, sides closing in, nothing but a small patch of light in the distance.  I am talking about my first marriage, or at least its latter phase.  It's history now, having long ago reached the light at the end of that marital tunnel.

Mark and Sharon were friends who transplanted quite smoothly from high school to college.  In truth, I hardly knew anyone in high school, but I knew them, and they knew me, as well as conditions allowed.  They were among the first couples in my life.  Because coupling was emotionally impossible for me then, Mark and Sharon seemed wondrously complete in their early union.  In my childhood home, marriage had seeped like a poisoned well.  It would be a long time, decades, before I got the toxins out of my system.  

For the time being, I was in a dim forest somewhere in the Santa Cruz Mountains, round about 1991 or '92.  I hadn't seen Mark and Sharon for years, and a visit was long overdue.  I hadn't seen a lot of people for years, and this was one of the sad and ridiculously intolerable aspects of Marriage I.  So I had set out to visit them on my own, driving to Boulder Creek or Ben Lomond or one of those mountain towns, arriving at their house in the trees.

As a couple, an early attraction of Mark-Sharon lay in their visible domesticity.  Even in the summer of my freshman university year, the two of them had set up marvelous house in a choice and secluded spot in the Berkeley hills.  The place was on loan, as I recall, from Sharon's sister and French brother-in-law, with a craftsman or Maybeck style, glassy, redwoodsy, shingley and, best of all for a still physically fit Southern California suburbanite, upstairs.  It overlooked a reservoir.  The place had built-in charms, and Mark and Sharon went about improving what they had.  It was the era of tie-dyed decor, of batik and chimes and colorful things in windows.  Sharon knew how to cook.  The two of them knew how to welcome.  Their tiny front room was carpeted with sleeping bags like mine much of the summer.

By my senior year, they had rented a cottage all their own, more spacious and even more private than its predecessor.  The sun entered at all angles, Sharon's fabrics fluttered everywhere and, as fate would have it, I lived only a couple of blocks away.  When I visited, the three of us got stoned, ate spaghetti or some variation and talked.  Sharon, indefatigably buoyant and outgoing, talked more than Mark.  She had a wry perspective on things, but not a bitter one.  Mark seemed much the opposite.  Marijuana sent him into a stoned silence.  His private broodings were opaque.  Once, he told me that his gradeschool educators had thought he was stupid, treating him accordingly.  He still smarted over this, but where the realization led, it was hard to say.

Meanwhile, his wife, blond and bouncy, held me in her thrall.  Clearly someone else's, Sharon was safe.  She would neither reject me nor overwhelm me.  All I had to do was please her.  Tasked with choosing the evening's LPs in the Maybeck atlier, I put on Vivaldi's Guitar Concerto in D.  How nice, Sharon said.  My heart swelled.  Next, it was Bachianas Brasileiros #5, with Villa-Lobos cellos and soprano whipping up a romantic storm.  Sharon said it was one of her favorites.  My heart gulped at proof of my lovability.  Next it was 'Pictures at an Exposition'.  Oh, not that, Sharon laughed.  I was crushed, my heart like a ballpoint pen being snapped in two.

But I reexperienced that sense of heart gulping affirmation just a couple of nights ago.  Marlou and I had had a stressful day.  Her nausea was increasing, sudden vomiting taking us both by surprise, and now her parents were newly arrived, and I was retreating to my office in search of the morning's San Francisco Chronicle.  By the end of the day, pinched, drawn and angry, I wanted nothing but sleep.  I rolled my wheelchair into the bedroom, worked off my shoes, wondered if I really mattered amid the illness and the in-laws.  And still, personal reserves low, turned to Marlou propped up in bed and asked if she would like me to read to her the letters of E. B.  White.  And that's when it came, this surprising gulp of realization.  And after decades, my heart was seizing at its capacity to give love, not my worthiness to receive it.

As for that evening almost 20 years ago in the Santa Cruz Mountains, it passed without incident.  When Mark told me that his mother Jean, perennially youthful, was getting on in years, I realized that years had gotten on.  Sharon's father and mother joined us at the table.  He seemed infirm and said little.  I tried my best to make conversation, but the evening was a struggle.  Everything was a struggle.  My wife didn't want me.  After 20 years of walking with a crutch, moving on my feet had become slow, shaky and a little scary.  I noticed that Sharon and Mark said little to each other.  But what did I know of such things?  They had been married a long time.  It was embarrassing to have landed a wife of my own, yet not have her there meeting my friends.

Sharon and Mark must have divorced about the same time I did.  Sharon married Jim, I discovered one day on the telephone, maybe five years after my dinner visit in the forest.  And now maybe 10 years after that, I've seen Sharon in Facebook.  And having just finished my own book, and stil having a face, I'll have to drive down to Santa Cruz and reconnect with Sharon and meet Jim.  For it's odd about people.  We need to honor their catalytic effect.  And we also need to honor the dark night in the forest.  

For as Marlou was saying moments ago over lunch as she shoved part of her ravioli my way, the only thing certain about love is its eventual loss.  We looked at each other.  A moment passed.  I went for the grated Parmesan.