November 2005 to January 2006, Los Angeles

By K.G. Hawthorne

November 27, 2005. Our 12th anniversary. As always it’s a Thanksgiving weekend, yet this is the first spent separately. I’ve been in Santa Barbara with family, he’s gone to Tahoe, having agreed to fly his friend’s 8-year-old daughter there from L.A. for the holiday.

He wants some time together on this day so here I am picking him up at the airport in Burbank, as I’ve done so many times. There again that soft look I’ve loved. A long, sweet kiss. Sara is with him and she gazes up at me uncertainly, knowing in her young girl’s way that our being together now isn’t usual. I give her a good hug and her reserve melts.

We have lived apart since June. “Did he jump, or was he pushed?” others have inquired. For months I couldn’t answer this but can now, with certainty: “Both.”

We take Sara home to her mother in Atwater Village and drive on to Los Feliz. The French place I like on Vermont. The cute waiters speaking in French, indulging my attempts. We actually choose fondue and, with a good red, enjoy the shared stabbing at burning bits of meat. Aggression we aren’t directing at each other feels fine right now.

Our marriage had become like that saccharine, heart-buckling hit by Elvis Presley:

Caught in a trap.
I can’t get out.
Because I love you too much, baby….

The initial idea had been separation, seeing a marital shrink weekly, not involving ourselves with anybody else. Seeing what we could sanely figure out. Most of these had been his stipulations, spoken adamantly. I’d agreed to these terms with some reluctance - and then, there by himself at a wrap party for the HBO series he’d just finished, he’d gotten blithering drunk and gone home with some camera assistant whose name he barely knew. And started living with her.

It’s taken me all these months to feel a little bit steadied, semi-“normal.” Maybe interested in the wider world once more. And now here he is, back and “missing” me. “Still in love” with me. Worried that I’ve recently met somebody I might actually like….

Of course any try at reconciliation only happens if I open the door. And I do. And our marriage is suddenly being relived from start to finish, this time on fast forward. Twelve years to be compressed into six weeks.

The sweetest times, of course, come back first. We’re able to talk again endlessly, seven hours at a stretch, seemingly about everything, like in our earliest, lost-in-each-other chapters.

Up to the sun and beyond the sun,
Up to the moon and beyond the moon,
Up to the sky and beyond the sky.

That’s a 5-year-old kid’s poem by my niece, Ruth, which we’d incorporated into the wedding vows we’d written to pledge to each other in our friends’ cabin, deep in the Angeles National Forest that weekend after Thanksgiving. The cabin we’d spent the summer in - house-sitting, consummating, making the big decisions.

I had managed for many years to avoid marriage. I’d sworn it off early, at a cocktail party given by my parents, saying at 14 (when I was pretending to understand Sartre) that I’d never do something so “bourgeois,” trap myself that way. The adults had laughed, not aware I based this on my parents’ stormy union. If this was marriage, who wanted it?

Instead I’d lived with someone a long enough time. Had boyfriends. Not had boyfriends. Stumbled badly. Picked myself up. Experimented every which way with my intent to have a free, feminist, Simone de Beauvoir kind of life.

When we met and, within eight months moved in together, it was into the Historic Register apartment in Los Feliz we’d both considered taking in exactly the same month, exactly a year earlier, before our paths had even crossed. Both of us had loved the space, and both had not wanted the roommate necessary to cover that rent. Yet now here we were together in that very place, and talking marriage.

To ease my anxiety, I dubbed it “the M word.” Often we’d tease it out between us, giggling, “that letter between L and N….” And then we did it.

Tonight, in early December, we’re at a party in Reseda where, amazingly enough, there live many interesting people in colorful, most un-Valley-like houses. One of these is our dear friend Stanley, at the housewarming he’s throwing with his new and very first wife. Stanley is someone I’d have privately taken bets would never marry. But after many brave attempts with online dating services, he connected with Mary, whose first email back to him had started, “Before we get married, I have a few questions….”

Now my husband and I stand side-by-side as we’ve done so many times, chatting easily with people, some new to us, some old acquaintances, some friends. Some know our story; some don’t. We admire Mary’s stellar art collection, try an hors d’oeuvre or two, pour each other wine. But really we’re back in that place of wooing, rebonding, and just wanting to be together.

So we sit off alone finally, on a sofa in the front living room, leaning in toward each other’s every murmuring. I almost feel there’s a glow around us, and wonder who can see it.

“Such a great-looking couple,” people have often said.

A late arrival is a well-known musician - a kind of punk rock sax player who has her own band. She’s recently bought a place up the road from our marriage cabin. I’ve never met her but have admired the music I’ve heard, the almost German Expressionist music videos she makes. She’s standing with her boyfriend in the kitchen as I approach to say hello.

The entire time we talk, as he and I hold hands, she stares utterly lasciviously at my still-husband. Perhaps I should recognize this isn’t so strange in a 30-something punk rock sax player, but I’m offended and so is he. It feels like somebody attempting a breaking and entering into our lives. So rude, we think. Something we’d never do, married, single, with a date or out alone. The sort of thing I hate when a guy does it, too. When it’s directed at me. (I’m remembering the gathering after a funeral for a good friend’s young daughter. A rather famous writer, there with his girlfriend, had come up and insinuated himself between me and my husband, as if I’m there solo and so is he.)

I’d like to tell this punk rocker where to put it, but we’re at Stanley’s party, and I’m not rude. God, whatever happened, we wonder, to any kind of manners? What about women treating other women as their “sisters?” What kind of world is this now?

We go back home. His home again, too, at least momentarily. We build a fire. Put on the music we love to share. Read each other poems. Stroke the cats.

But sex between us doesn’t work anymore. Why not? I do not know. The attraction remains intense but somehow coming together in this way now is like applying hot pokers to exposed skin.

The single time we make love, I cry. This freaks him out. And I don’t understand his reaction. I’ve been solitary, celibate by choice and emotional necessity. Without this contact since the night before he left. Now he’s reached in to me so deeply, releasing me. Crying doesn’t seem strange to me at all. In fact, it seems an affirmation, almost joyous.

Reacting so divergently, we begin to pull back from each other. No more long, intimate talks. Yet we stay together in the house a few weeks longer, lingering for what still feels good. We still love laying side-into-side at night, spoon-like, melded. His arms wrapped around me, his shallow sleep-breath warming the side of my face. Sometimes I lay there silently awake, listening to it, to all his familiar sounds, deep in the late dark night.

Somehow we make it through Christmas. But now we’re like a song by those French Canadian sisters, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, whose tunes I’d send out over the airwaves with sweet pleasure when I deejayed:

We could sit and talk like that
‘til words were coming out our ears…
Not just for days or weeks or months
but it’s been years…

Now here they come,
here come my tears…

In my 20s, I’d put in five passionate, poorly paid public radio years on the air at KCFR-FM in Denver. There I’d been the first to play country music. In some ways this was kitsch at a station known for its high-toned mixes of Bartok with Anthony Braxton and Carla Bley, airy Peruvian panpipes, Tom Waits. My colleagues were amused, then started slipping a tune in here or there themselves. I recognized the sometimes unintended humor in such over-the-top lyrics - even played it for that reason, but also loved their down-into-the-depths honesty, their “blue-eyed soul.” Dolly Parton’s pure, high voice. Waylon and Willie’s outlaw ways.

My still-husband offers that the things between us that had gone wrong are still wrong. That really, “Nothing has changed.” I want to say, “Duh.” Exclaim, “What did you expect?” But instead say softly that of course it’s true and that it doesn’t surprise me.

His tone edges back to criticism, all that projection of old painful stuff so much his own, shot again like poison arrows back at me. I realize now how glad I’ve been to be away from it. What it’s cost emotionally. How much it weighed. All that passion that’s been there so long between us is still there, but now comes out in anger. Some kind of dark, molten substance giving off fumes.

“D-I-V-O-R-C-E….”

Tammy Wynette had wailed it out. At KCFR, when I’d played the song, I’d heard it in terms of my parents, whose 25-year marriage was just then a building burning down. All these years later the song applies to me.

Thank God, I think. Unlike in Tammy’s song, there are no children. We’re the children. Bleeding. Flailing. Hoping to reclaim ourselves separately. Somehow. Some day.

K.G. Hawthorne, a long-time Colorado radio producer, now works as a script researcher and creative consultant in Los Angeles. She is using a pseudonym.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 | Email This Post

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