Great Expectations (Estella's Story 1.0)

It's late; I read my wife to sleep; Eudora Welty. A beautiful start of a story about an abandoned albino woman and her twins. King MacLain was her husband's name I think. A Golden Shower. (Yeah, it's an odd title. See what has happened to us gen xer's?)

The night is warm, and the crickets are throbbing in the wood. There are so many of them. My mood is starting to lift a little; my anxiety dropping. It's been a shitty weekend. My wife is working four straight twelves in a row, and it's nice to have Mikey back, but school is starting, I'm already preparing, and I miss vacation and the constant company it brought. I was alone so much as a child. I sometimes isolate now, but I don't like it. When I can get it, I prefer company.

And truthfully, this is the first time I've started blogging with no idea what I'll say.

Fact is I'm used to support groups where nothing gets held back. I haven't been in one since I moved north, so saying I'm used to them is probably no longer true, but I spent almost a decade in groups like that. And I just can't go that raw in the blog. It's not a pure recovery environment and I mean no offense by that at all, but I tend to share only the issues I know will resonate, which is most of them incidentally, including my spiritual doubts. Plus this is co-ed. Everyone reading understands that. And I've written about my faith here, though I'm not sure why that should hold me back. Finally, my wife may read this, though I still don't know if she ever has and I'm chicken to ask. Not to mention lurkers.

I want to believe Jesus hears me and will help me, and with some things he seems to have helped me. But go to Dave's page and check out The Palmer Journal. Click back, if you can stand the slow load times, and read the blog in March, April, through the summer of 2003. He writes very short posts; the reading is quick, but his story, watching his 26 year old wife and mother of his one year old son die of stomach cancer, while she is prayed over continously, is chilling. Sure, it's one thing when Joy Davidman dies of cancer, in her sixties, with a long history. But what this guy went through...it makes me sick and angry. And it happens every day.

My wife works in a hospital as a respiratory therapist; she works trauma codes all the time. Can you imagine that? Coming home sore from compressing some dying person's ribcage; sometimes they do that for almost an hour? I've seen one dead body in my life and that was my grandma at her funeral and it sure wasn't her any more. But Steph sees it every week, from auto accidents to cancer.

And she had a woman in there recently who died; the husband had his hand on her foot and was praying in tonges while they were trying to bring her back. Her whole family was in there praying. And she died and she wasn't much older than me.

Why am I getting so dark? Why am I always so pissed off? When will the well of hurt and rage and doubt finally disappear? Will it ever? I used to feel like my entire body was full, like an overinflated balloon, with anger and pain and feelings of all kinds. Now that's not normally so. But still, so much remains. And though I know better, I'm afraid I'm becoming the dark and depressed guy in our blog family. (We should name this family btw, like Romy's). Well, better to be honest than lie. A couple of you I know well enough to know you'll read on no matter what I say.

I suppose events like the death of Palmer's wife remind me of things in my own life I'm still stunned/hurt/angry over. Things that went wrong that should not have gone wrong. Times I came around a corner and found a demon when I expected grace. And there is no time more like that than the story of my first marriage. I have had only five real relationships in my life, each with its own narrative, but my ex, who I'll call Estella here...ah, now there is a dark tale. And though some of you know it, I feel it's time to tell it. So sit back; I apologize for these narrow margins;t his will be one long and skinny post.

***

I met Estella when she was 18 and I was 19 at an AGO square dance. I looked across the square, and there she was. I saw her name on the little white paper cowboy hat name tag she had pinned to her blouse, and I thought she was far too pretty for me. Blonde hair, Irish smile, brilliant blue eyes. The milk complexion of an 18 year old girl. I thought, 'she's beyond me, out of my league.' God if only I had been right. How much one chance event changes an entire life.

I didn't talk to her that night, but a night later (I was rushing and there were events all week) some AGO active brought her in and told her to hit me with a pillow. Why, I don't recall; I think he had a crush on her and I was a handy almost-pledge. She wouldn't do it of course, but it was how we met. That night was the skate party, and I think we might have held hands during a slow skate or two. But we went back to the AGO house and stayed up talking until nearly dawn. And that was the way of it. E and I just couldn't be pulled apart; if we got together, we talked until three in the morning. I must have been happy and scared at the same time: the golden girl, Athena, was clicking with me. I guess you could say we became best friends, or close, that semester. I dumped my outside the fraternity girlfriend who probably really did love me, though she was older and there were many differences, and started seeing Estella, the pedestal ideal, all I could.

But not dating. No, not dating. Soon after we met I told an AGO buddy of mine I dug her and I got to ride with the two of them to our beach camp out in his convertible vw bug (Hodgie, I miss you man). And that's when I got the 'talk' at a pizza parlor, sitting right next to Hodgie with E across the table. I was so inane as to tell her, 'I want to kiss as many girls as I can before I die;' and Estella distanced herself right away, and began to talk about 'physical affection' and how special it was and how kissing should be reserved for committed relationships. I was hooked even deeper. Something about unacquired beauty, the tension of waiting, the ivory object kept at a distance.

And that night, at retreat, we stayed up and talked to nearly dawn again, on the beach, with the mist and the waves rolling in below the cliffs at San Onofre. Still, no physical contact beyond leaning on each other, but a strange, and inexplicable, magnetism. A need just to talk and do nothing else. Perhaps a friendship I knew at some level could not involve closeness? It's been twenty years; I don't actually know what drew us to each other with such stifling intensity, but I felt that draw for a decade longer. I requested her as a big sister, every pledge gets one from among the little sisters, and she 'revealed' by showing up at my mom's house wearing a trench coat I could never have afforded. We ended up at her parent's place that weekend, staying up until nearly dawn in their decorated living room (and she pointed that out, then or soon after, that their room had been done by a designer) and then she went to her room and I heard the lock click decisively as I lay on the couch and tried to sleep as their pet doves begain cooing; I think she wanted me to hear that click, it was coy, even for a girl her age. If I had known that one evening would be a metaphor for eight entire years, I would have drive away before light.

The first sign of real trouble came near the end of that first semester. By now we were best friends, a hot item around the house, but still not technically dating and certainly not kissing or doing anything else remotely sexual. That spring, the spring of 1984, I asked her to formal, the dress-up banquet/dance at the end of each semester. And she thought about it. And she said no. She was going with some 26 year old guy no one even knew.

This was almost like having your girlfriend say no to the prom. We weren't truly dating, no, but we spent all our time together. I had met her upper middle-class parents; but still, she didn't go, though I asked her some cute way by writing it on a cake. Still I made the best of that night: I took another girl, a girl named Stephanie F., and I should have kept taking her places. We had a limo because her dad drove one part time; she and my buddy's date came down a staircase together in formal gowns like something out of a film. I had just received my active pin. I was double-dating with the president of the fraternity and his gorgeous Alpha Phi girlfriend. The truth is it was perhaps the best day of my life then and still may be one of the best. Why didn't I begin seeing Stephanie? She was beautiful, but not classicly so, and she actually liked me perhaps for a brief time, a sure shoot down; I wanted drama, chaos, uncertainty, and the purity of having a girlfriend I never touched. I do remember that at the after party, after Stephanie and I had been dancing to 'what I like about you' and various songs where I could show off my eighties terminator tech-noir moves, Estella came up to me and said, 'I wish I'd come here with you.' Guess her older guy wasn't working out. And I was a damned fool for hearing that.

Because the next day a bunch of us went to Palm Springs; someone had a condo out there. And Stephanie F. didn't go, but Estella did. And sure enough, we spent that entire first night walking around talking, in the gorgeous desert air, and at the end of it as the sun was coming up she sat down on the curb in her shorts and sweatshirt, curled those little thin legs, and started crying. I had never seen her express emotion like that before though she was barely 19; her feelings were completely controlled until much later. And I asked her, 'why are you crying?' And she managed to choke out something I think I didn't want to hear and can't remember verbatim, but the gist was that she was sad for us because we were coming closer together and she had never been able to make a relationship work and somehow she sensed disaster for us; she knew we were doomed, though we were teenagers still. And we were doomed, and I should have listened, but I don't think either of us really did. Her hair was so light and beautiful, and her crying face, and the vulnerability of that feeling. I was swept away. You know how precious physical touch, closeness, proximity with a woman is when you aren't experiencing it, even her scent? Why I didn't kiss her then I don't know. Before her I had had two previous relationships that were orgasmic, both had not ended well, and I still felt guilt in my bones; truly was probably still in love with my high school sweetheart, who was engaged to another guy by then. But one look from Estella, one movement towards me, and I would have taken her as far as she would have gone. Certainly kissed those white teeth and that child's mouth. Yet I didn't. She cried, and I must have said something to contradict what she was saying. The truth is I don't remember.

And so things went on in pretty much the same friend/date limbo. We kept hanging out, not dating, whenever we got close my anger/fear would seethe up and I'd get distant or she'd pull away or both. There was something not natural about what we were doing, and not doing. There was no committment of any kind. But if one of us had another date...oh, Estella was right there on more than one occasion and I probably was too; I remember showing up at her apartment when another guy was there trying to get to know her more than once. And also being on a crusade conferernce in San Jose and some stunning UCLA girl trying to talk to me, the kind of girl who forty years ago would be wearing pearls and a kilt-dress, and Estella was suddenly standing there interrupting. She was depressed, and so was I, though we were both in denial about our depressions. I suppose we sensed we both stood out in that way. In some sense we had a lot, in another we had almost nothing, but we clung to our little buddy-raft with all we had.

Most strangely, while we wouldn't mouth kiss, we'd do wierd things like kiss on the neck only, or the hands, even the navel (well, I kissed her navel) as if we were avoiding some kind of no-no mouth barrier; we were avoiding it. Why? I guess we still hadn't said we wanted to actually be with each other, we wouldn't allow us to draw close, even as years, more than three, ticked by. I think now what we were avoiding was love. Love and intimacy and risk and beauty. What we had togehter was worse than a drug and was hurting us both, but it was all we had, all I had. Though in our defense, somehow we probably knew if we got close our rage and fear would drive us violently apart, as it eventually did. It was like knowing you had to eventually jump in the cold water, knowing it would kill you, and putting it off as ridiculously long as you could, having a conversation with someone on the dock in the same situation as yourself. Of course, at the time we told each other we were being good Christian young persons, busy in Crusade and saving the world and not getting wet together, while I at least had a prodigous, and unsatisfying, solo career.

And god I was dependent on her. Once she went to Palm Springs with crusade when I had dropped out of college and I drove all the way there with grasshopper and surprised her at an outdoor concert. Lots of things like that. When I found out she was going on a summer project to Japan I went into a serious anxious depression, nearly a breakdown. I remember just laying on the couch at my mom's and holding her, in terror, for three hours, sweating and afraid to let go, listening to the tick of the clock; and that was nine months before she was due to leave. Things got so bad I had to drop out of college that same month and take xanax for more than a year (ah, xanax, the cure no one will give you anymore and you probably don't want). So Estella stayed connected to me, but I went from being a campus leader and fraternity guy to terror-ridden and depressed, completely consumed by obsessions and sleeping on the fold-out in my mother's house in Bellflower and not working at all. I was 20 then. And she'd come by and sometimes sleep with me, right next to me, on that crappy fold out couch; we did that many times. But still...no kissing, no lovemaking at all (but steam building in me like midwest rain in summer, hanging heavy in dark clouds, ready to drop.)

She went to Japan the summer of 1986, and I survived. In fact I was preaching the gospel all around my apartment building. There was another girl that summer, Michelle, who I also did nothing but sleep in the same bed with, but she really is another story. I wonder where she is. She was in Hustler magazine when she was underage; I actually went with her once to Larry Flynt's office in Century City though I didn't see him. Anyway, Michelle started dating a guitarist named Ariel; Estella came back and we picked right up.

And then I started working at a Calvinist bookstore, my anxieties in marginal check from 3 milligrams of xanax a day, and Estella she was still there. When I got into an argument which nearly became a fist fight with some idiot who worked there (and last I heard, years ago, had lost his faith) over the extent of the atonement (did Jesus die for everyone or just the elect) she was standing right there bringing me lunch. And so it went, for more than three years. We were together, not dating anyone else, but not a couple and still not kissing. I was seeing a therapist a little who might have been able to help me, but I'm trying to keep my mental illness story separate as much as I can from E's story. Then one day E and I ended up at First Baptist Lakewood and heard Matt Hannan.

Actually, we may have heard him in Palm Springs also. But if you know the guy, you know his speaking power. We followed him back to Bethany (started attending the church) and somehow ended up talking to him. I think I had scared E with my newfound predestination calvinist freak-power system and she had gone to Matt, crying, to find out what the heck I was talking about. And he wanted to talk to me. And for some reason, Matt recommended I see a different therapist. I don't know why, but he did. This was how I met Keith Pust. But he's another story also, though he will come into this one later.

Most importantly, Matt also recommended we actually try dating each other, kissing included. Why not? It seems a rational thing now looking back. Three and a half years had gone by without so much as one mouth kiss, without the boyfriend/girlfriend status we should have had all along. And so we kissed not long after, the first time lying on her bed in the little apartment she now rented in Long Beach; it was of course a little anti-climactic after so long. But fun enough, and finally, we became a real couple. Forty months we had been building, waiting, for something huge. And it lasted about four months.

I really don't remember what went wrong. Physical affection perhaps? And I don't want to go and read my old journals to remember. The last time I did that, about a year ago, I came away in crushing pain, acutely aware of how much we had been hurting each other all that time, how insecure and unstable and dependent the relationship really was and how deeply I was in denial about its flaws. And frankly, how batty she was also, how many signs came earlier on that something was very wrong in that small blonde head and heart. A girl with those issues would send me running now, but I was of course very wounded myself. I know we broke up over the phone, and I think it was her that did it, and I called up John Banman and told him what happened and he came and picked me up (I didn't have a car anymore, and that bothered her, taking me to church was one of the problems) and John took me to what we then called the dude pad. Four guys who went to Bethany, a bit older, and (allegedly) all into recovery. I spent the night there, and the next day one of the dudes took me to his mom's for easter, and I fell asleep on the couch listening to baseball and feeling safe. I felt like I had really taken care of myself; I had reached out, something I never ever did, and had found a warm and sure world. The truth is that's the last time I remember doing that: falling asleep with the tv on and feeling relaxed and safe.

Because E really was, in the immortal words of Lance Clarke, the gift that keeps on giving. I was at her place, as usual, a week or so later, and she told me the guy who had taken me to his mom's had hit on her, even taken her out, that week (no, none of this was John Banman) and I found out later they had actually made out. Made out. I waited forty months like Noah for that man. I was so, so, naive. When I tried to talk to the guy about it he just kept saying, with this stupid wince look on his face, 'what did I do wrong?' Looking back, I don't know. Maybe you were a fucking asshole? But I wanted to feel close to him and distance her, and somehow the opposite happened. My first reach out into space had brought me pain, betrayal, and it wasn't the last time. During the short time E and I had been a couple we had started going to a support group (with the almighty Karnafel's) and one of the guys, a guy who was like 50 and who I had been reaching out to and who had been reaching out to me, called E and asked her out. How did she attract such poison? And why did she tell me?

But change was coming: Estella began to change that year after we broke up. She had always underdressed, had just a few extra pounds (looking back not really but I've always had a problem in this area, try using porn instead of real women for a few years). She colored her hair, began dressing to suit her figure, and lost weight. She was stunning, more so than ever. And I was madly in love/lust with her still. She too was seeing Keith Pust for therapy, and I remember talking to him about the break-up; I compared it to being in a horse race, and he said, 'she really gets you chomping at the bit, doesn't she?'

Incidentally, it was awful, us seeing the same therapist with her bailing out on me, but it wasn't the last or worst time. Horror followed us like dark weather.

Digression: I can't tell stories like Scott or Romy or even come close; and of course I have a wife who could read this and I want to be respectful of that relationship also. But back to the narrative. I should end part one by now but it's late, I can't sleep, and I'm on a roll:

That summer, the summer of 1987, Estella got a boyfriend. I remember sitting up at night with her at the college church retreat that summer, and then kissing her neck, and she freaked out. She told me later how disappointed she was, how sorry she was it happened. Whatever. I probably was not very good at emotional closeness (probably?) and the way E and I had gone about it: by denying ourselves for so many years I had developed a lot of latent anger; I was very sexually repressed being good for her all those years and kissing her neck felt so nice. I may have been hot, but I was no mauler. But whatever, that night made her both angry and scared. I remember she went to her tent and I actually slept on the ground, on the cement, by the firepit, with only my brother's letterman jacket for a sleeping bag. The next day John B. was just looking at me; I had dirt on my face like a street person and thought nothing of it. He felt my self-neglect, somehow saw the made dash I was in, and my self-neglect was enormous those days as I chased E like Daisy from Gatsby or Judy Jones from Winter Dreams. And did I. (Or like Pip and Estella, my ex-wife's psuedonym namesake.) The entire time I dated her and even was married to her my needs were crushed into a small ball in the corner of my soul as I struggled to keep up with her caprice and hate and need to be cared for. Anyway, around the time of the beach retreat she met another guy, this truck driver who looked like Hermes, was new to the church and was a huge caretaker (at least to me, perhaps he felt guilty) and for four months or so E and I had almost no contact.

Oh I tried at the beginning. I could not believe I could be replaced. I came to her place, I gave her cards, I strained to bring her back; but the first day she sat in church with him I sat on the front steps of Bethany in total shock. And it was Brent S. who came up to me and asked me how I was doing, and I genuinley asked if he was taking a survey or really wanted to know, and he said he really wanted to know, and I began sobbing and he took me to his office and I cried and cried. I don't know what he was thinking: thank god their wierdness is over maybe? But for four months I lived on an anxious edge, craving information about her and her guy, not sleeping well and obsessed with her still. I began dating other girls, a little, not enough. I had just started to see (though I hadn't kissed!) a girl who lived in Palos Verdes and seemed very sweet; she used to be a little sister. And one or two girls from church I also saw casually. But none of those little loves got a chance.

Estella and Hermes got together at the end of summer. I remember she took him with her family to Yosemite at Thanksgiving, which they did every year, and which she hadn't wanted me to go to before: I had asked and been refused. And right around New Year's, almost exactly, E was literally on my doorstep, or maybe standing at my car, with her smile and all the power she knew she had behind it. She had dropped Hermes; she began looking for me almost the same day. And like a fool, I fell right into it, though it killed me, it was such self-denying horror, for me to be with her so soon after her relationship, the one she had jilted me for. I remember her driving us to Lighthouse bookstore around that time and I was just crying in the car, crying because this all felt so wrong, because I had found out they began kissing right away (normal, yes?) and even fdone a little more at the end. And still, I took her back like a drug, like my only salvation, like a wife who has wandered, god again like Jay Gatsby peering into the kitchen.

And now I am almost done with part one. My fingers are tired. I'll end with our engagement.

We began dating in the spring of that same year, dating as in kissing, as we'd been hanging out since January though it took her time to get over her ex. I remember he called her house once when I was there and she got off the phone and told me he was crying. Oh man. I said something about how he had choices in his life, whatever, to assuage her guilt, if guilt it really was. There's no rule against breaking up I guess, and I had even warned the guy about our turbulent and tenacious history.

We began kissing, as I've said, and actually really fell into it. We didn't go much beyond that, but I can remember sitting in Brent's office and talking about how far is too far; I even remember her getting up once and refusing to take communion because she felt guilty though I know we were never genital and certainly not orgasmic before marriage. And I guess I've said enough about that. But I felt so pulled in, used really. We'd make out in her room until 3 (no release), I'd ride my motorcycle home in the wet beach air, and I'd barely make it to work the next day. My self-neglect became extreme as I immersed myself, or was immersed. in the warm bath of kissing for hours (I remember her taking my hand and leading me to her bedroom more than once when I really needed to go home).

The kickstart on my bike broke and instead of fixing it I push started that thing for more than a year. Push started it every time. And just kept making out. I guess it kept us from talking, from getting close. Where a few years before we had used total abstinence as a tool to maintain distance, we now used long nights of kissing and holding each other and kissing some more. It was great, but too much also. If I had had sexual expectations earlier, now I really had them. We were moving toward marriage, and I was 24, and ready as only a guy that age who has never had sex and who hasn't had an orgasm with a woman in years can be.

I think it was that fall she began talking about marriage. We were hanging out in my room at the AGO house (I had reentered college and was living at the fraternity) and we had the door open of course, and one of the guys was trying to get us out of there and into a group boardgame, which was being held in the very same room where E and I had stayed up late that first night of the skate. We were reeking unrequited sensuality and I think the brothers were worried about me in there. She just began talking about it, so slowly, calmly, as if she was predicting or foreseeing the event. I think she picked the month and maybe the date right that night. I got a ring on credit, asked her to marry me in her backyard a few weeks later, and we were official. I was 24, she was 23. The whole world was before me. She had matured into a young woman of astonishing, Arquette-like beauty. I had known her for nearly five years; we had been best friends for most of that time. We were kissing now and enjoying it. What could possibly go wrong? Yes I was drugged by her indolent beauty and sexuality, withheld as it was still; I drank in her scent, the feel of her hair and shape, and awaited the final release, the sacramental nest, the consummation, my great expectation. I think I believed sex would fix everything wrong inside me. I'd finally 'get it' and be okay. Oh man. My anxieties were dormant, I was leading a bible study, all looked promising. What the angels must say, watching us in their spare time, if they have any. Or to quote the Romans, 'the gods in their kindness hide the future from men.' I wish in his kindness he had shown me mine.

And looking back, I wonder how well I really even knew her or she knew me or we knew ourselves, even after five years. But all that is for part two.

Thanks for the patience, those of you who got to the end. I know I don't do details and dialogue as I should, and it's hard to say if this story has any interest out there after all these years, but for me it's important to write it, to remember and heal my wounded roots as I strive to draw close in my current relationship (which is what's sending me back here as much as anything).

Love,

t