Estella's Story 2.0

Dearest S, my wife: this is another post about Estella, my ex. Please skip if you can; if not, read on, though there is nothing here for us.

It is raining and I am up very early; I was awake before 6:00. I am not a morning person, but I woke from a troubling and emotionally intense dream. The kind of dream I used to have often. Years ago I had dreams like this at least once a month. Now, very infrequently, perhaps once a year, less.

E was in my dream. I was single and coming home to an apartment I've never actually lived in. Whether I was expecting her or not I don't recall, but she was there, her book bag (the green one) and other stuff scattered in a pile on my living room floor; she sat there in jeans, doing whatever she had been doing, reading or studying...and when I walked in unexpected she was happy to see me.

That last, tragic part is the center of this particular dream. The woman who once abandoned our life together, leaving nothing but pink plastic razors in our shower, the girl who went from wife to someone who suddenly seemed to hate and fear and (maybe) love me all at once, was again showing joy at seeing me, the way she did for so many years before the Great Chaos. In the dream she still had the same brilliant blue light in her eyes, the light that, in retrospect, was perhaps more promise of warmth than true warmth (or perhaps the hope for warmth) more focused inward than I could understand, but which also reflected a genuine pleasure when they looked at me. Those eyes were back in the dream, as real as the computer I am writing on now, and as in all dreams, I was emotionally naked before them, without reason, without defense, protection, analysis. Truthfully, I felt elated, like again seeing a sister I haven't seen for a decade (and it has been longer than that now); but the deepest part of that ecstasy, I understand now that I am awake, was the feeling of having someone who rejected me deeply return, love me again, act as if, even if her life is different, her happiness to see me is unfeigned, the same as it was in college or the better moments of the years after. It feels, almost, like a redemption; more like the dressing of a wound, or the removal of a wound completely.

The dream went on. I think she talked a little about her life, though I don't know what she said. I do know she looked about the same as she did when I saw her last, which is probably not the case. But the dream ended, as again this kind of dream often does, with another mood. Two apparently rich guys sitting in a rich guy car, talking about Estella in a beach parking lot, myself as observer as if watching a film, and one saying to the other, 'oh, she's taken you know, husband, a son by him, and his older daughter too.' And then the happiness of impossible reunification in the dream becomes the old pain I know so well, that I could describe like a part of my own body. A daughter, a son, a husband. None of it part of me.

* * *

I don't actually know if she has any of those things, if Robert had a daughter from his first marriage, if they married or had a child of their own as in the dream (though once, about six or seven years ago, I woke up in Steph's apartment sure E had come in a dream to tell me she had a child; it was so compelling I got up and looked around the bedroom and hallway to see if she was actually there in my half-sleep). I have good reasons to believe they did marry, but I never got the final story, and I never looked hard enough to really discover it. Why? Those blue eyes probably do still exist, but what lives behind them is so different from what I knew...I would only be a phantom before them, and based on the person I was when I knew her, a guy in his teens and twenties and deeply depressed at the end, I don't suppose I'd look like much based on her memories. Also, we have been apart now longer than the entire time I knew her. I have been with my wife as a couple for almost nine years. But still, at times for no reason I can see, the dream comes.

* * *

In the first section of this story, a quick narrative covering 1984 to 1989, the years we knew each other before we were married, I found myself stressing some things I find odd in reflection. My own incredible sexual frustration while dating E, for one; I didn't consider it an issue much at the time as I remember. Something which rarely was a conflict, mostly just before the marriage; I just assumed non sexual affection, not even kissing, nothing that would make us a couple, was how it would be with this girl while we were 'friends' and accepted that as the very best way, the Christian way. For many it is. Though the long years we never even kissed...looking back, it reads very strange. I needed physical love, but I was no rapist hiding in the closet of her life. Yes I was desperate for physical intimacy, more desperate than I admitted to myself except perhaps in the final year or so before the wedding, but then most of the other guys I knew were desperate too, guilty every time they crossed a line with their girlfriends or fiancees (lines E and I never really crossed, or not much). Still, remembering that first post, my sexual frustration/repression stands out from almost the first night I stayed up and spoke with her. I can't deny it. I sure denied it at the time.

The other thing I recall, and I do believe I mentioned this, is how strangely we would keep each other in the other's control but remain at a distance. We didn't date other people, except for her one actual boyfriend smack in the middle of our time together. For years, we were attached in an unbendable way. Truly, like siblings, but siblings who even though we hung out all the time, had no idea how to have a normal conflict or intimate conversation. When one would draw close, the other would pull away. Lots of distance drama.

But there is more of the story to tell, as long as this post already is. My household remains asleep, and hopefully will sleep in long enough for me to process this and post.

Estella's Story 2.0

We did become engaged to be married, and I was, at 24, flooded with desire. But clearly, we had been best friends, at whatever capacity of that we could manage, for five years before we walked the aisle. More than five. We spent more time together than any same sex friends we had for most of that time. How could things go wrong? How could we not truly love each other? We were attending church, I was leading a bible study (truthfully, I think, in part to show her I was superior to the guy she had so suddenly began dating just as we finished our first failed foray into coupleship; but then, Christian or not, put me in a church and I find myself leading). Everyone who knew us since we were teenagers saw us as indestructible, I think. But during the engagement, dark, dark, things began to slither from out of someplace inside her. Dark things.

For one, looking back at old journals, she told me at one point she was afraid I was going to lose control and beat her up. This was during our engagement, or maybe the dating just before it. This, honestly, I can base on nothing. We weren't even having fights. When she dated the other guy (and I forget what I called him in the first post, Hermes maybe) I never got angry at her like I should have, yelled, raised my voice, told her to go to hell after all we'd had, or had hoped to have, together; told her we were over for good if she chose him over me. (I should have known: all those years she refused to let me go with her family to Yosemite at thanksgiving, where they always went; two months dating Hermes and he was there: months later I saw the pictures of them ice skating in the snow; by January she was hanging around my house again).

While I'm sure I had deep seated, intense anger from my past, I felt her fear was coming from out of nowhere. Truly, it was. I never grabbed her, shook, her, hit things, all those years we dated. Robert taught me to hit things later, but I never touched her.

The other, more ominous thing, was that she began to tell me during our engagement she believed she had been molested.

I think I've cloaked her identity enough here to talk about this. Anyone who knows her and is reading these posts already knows this. But she was still seeing Keith, our first predator therapist (this was before he had sex with a client) and she had begun to have strange dreams during the engagement. Intuitions. No actual memories, but just feelings. And those feelings, friends, put the quick brakes on what was beginning to be a fairly warm physical relationship (but still not going past kissing, or not much past).

What was I to do? How to handle this? I remember sitting in the office of the pastor who was to marry us having her tell him: her therapist said she was disassociating, having nightmares...E was telling the pastor she didn't know if she could 'do it,' literally, become my lover after the wedding. And he, fool that he was in that hour, an hour during which we were considering postponing our wedding, brushed it off as cold feet, the virgin jitters (though he used neither of those terms). After all, six months before, or less, we were in there, my own body in flames, asking him how far he thought we could go. Based on this short history of physical desire and almost hypnotic passion (and not on the years of strangeness before it, which he knew about quite well and had witnessed most of) he felt that once we got married things would settle down. And we, I at least, believed him. I even thought, insanely naive technical virgin that I was, that if we had sex once a week, once a month, it would be better than it was now. How unaware I was of the sexual complexity of a genuine marriage. Of the burning heat of youth.

Also, I'd like to add, if you want your timing belt changed, see a mechanic. If you have a theological question, consult a cleric or a reference. If you have a therapist issue, find a real counselor and even then cross your fingers.

I do know, and this I admit to my everlasting shame (indeed, though I understand I am forgiven intellectually, I would like to confess this sin, and one other that will come into this story eventually, to my priest; Episcopalians have some kind of rite for that I believe; there is no penance I could do, no way to change this, but it would do my spirit good), to my great shame I began to argue with E about her own molestation. We were close to the wedding now. We already had gotten a place together on a little street called Ransom where she was living alone (and she told me about footprints in the mud behind her apartment; had me put nails into the windows so they could only open a few inches so no one could climb in and get her, which I did, heavy framing nails). It was there I first remember a kissing session stopping short. The wedding was probably two months away, maybe even less. I was ready, radically. Those of you know who know my intensity...that did carry into that area also. Finally, release, consummation, perhaps I believed that physical intimacy would give us the emotional intimacy that I didn't comprehend we tragically lacked. I really do believe that latter part. But while I supported her continued therapy (and we had little money) I simply couldn't understand what was happening. When I asked who, what, when? There was no answer. Only a feeling, a sense that she had somehow been violated but couldn't remember it. I recall, when she had her first pelvic exam of her life, before the wedding, she asked the doctor if she had an intact hymen. The doctor (a woman, of course) said yes, but there was some tearing, it could have come from many activities over the years. E asked if it could have been from having sex. The doctor said, 'well, maybe once.'

Once. Maybe. Dear God, if so, with who and at what age?

But whether there was any physical evidence, there was certainly a growing emotional panic inside her; panic and perhaps a hatred. And while I did some things to try and help her uncover her abuse, I felt her pulling away from me with awful speed, and I found myself for the most part unable to help her. I didn't know what to say, or what to do, or how to react so close to the wedding; and truthfully, part of me didn't want to hear it if it meant she was going away from me, emotionally and physically, and she was certainly changing fast.

Years after the divorce, cleaning out an old box of papers in my garage in Belmont shore, I found a card she had written to me during those weeks before we were married. (Dear God, hold me up now; show me a grace greater than my own self-hatred which feels overwhelming; I have never told anyone this.) The card, which of course I threw away, as I have thrown every other single thing with her distinct, cursive hand away, was brief but very direct and more honest than almost anything she ever wrote or said to me: it was something like, dear troy, as we get close to the wedding, I find myself unable to talk to you about my possible incest; this is a serious problem, one of the biggest problems I've had to face in my life, I need your support...I can't remember any more of what she wrote now or even if I got it right. How I wept when I read it years later, wept and hated myself. But that was the heart of it: she was reaching out, or very skillfully not reaching out (perhaps setting me up for some of the blame) on this one issue. I wanted a lover, a wife; I had waited five long years for her. To have her suddenly, for the first time in all those years, drag this hulking carcass, stinking of death and doom and perversion, and throw it onto the bridal linen between us...I wasn't a good support person on this issue, and I believe I told her so; I lacked the skills and it came too close to me. I wanted her to get help, but I couldn't give it, and it seemed she most wanted me to understand her, though again, she was a very smart, very smart, very self-protective girl. If she had told me it was her father, say, I would have accused him to his face, had an enemy I could name and that we could hate together.

But she had no specific memories, nothing concrete to share. She had none of that, or none that she was telling. In fact, if she ever did uncover who her perpetrator was, she never told me, not before, during, or after the wedding, though later she had a suspect.

God, and on top of all of this, I had tried to get professional advice, from a pastor I thought was nearly infallible. Who may have thought it himself; that I do not know.

All this, and I haven't even gotten to the wedding! Or the disastrous honeymoon at Tahoe, events which occurred not far from where I now live.

The tragedy is we did get married. Her in the absolute height of her physical beauty and probably emotional vulnerability (trusting me, perhaps, or do I give her too much credit; was her aversion to true intimacy as great as my own, her need to destroy even greater?); me somehow believing we'd work this out as we had managed to work everything else out, or at least stay connected all these years. I do remember the horror of the rehearsal and the following dinner, though. When I saw her standing with her father at the end of the church aisle she was sobbing. And she kept sobbing. She cried through the entire rehearsal or close. And she cried, as I look back, like a girl being offered as sacrifice, or like someone horribly torn. I thought at the time she was sad over her lack of closeness with her father, who was symbolically giving her to me, of course, walking her down the aisle. But now I see those girl's tears differently. I know that my aunt B, the Sedona aunt actually, the only one of the four sisters, including my mother, that I can risk emotion with, came up to me after the church part of the rehearsal and told me, very distinctly, 'that girl is not ready to get married.' I hardly knew my aunt then, she had never met E, but she said it more than once.

She was tragically right, as tragic as rigid steel. 'That girl is not ready to be married.' She wasn't. I wasn't either, and from the moment I saw Estella standing at the end of the aisle I knew something was wrong. I got feet so cold they went black and fell off. I wanted to call of the wedding, over some panic I could not identify, madly. I had the wildest passion to run. But I reasoned with myself: I could find no good reason to do so, the sudden intrusion of my feelings made no sense to me, they weren't related to any certain issue, I simply sensed disaster, a deep reticence not to go through with it. Later, at the ceremony, that horror, that desire to stop, turn back, dominated the entire day. I threw up in the bathroom at my own reception; I didn't want to cut the cake, I swear it was the truth that I had to force my hand to actually cut the cake with her, holding the knife together. Every step of it, the walking to the front to meet her, the terror I felt saying the vows (I do remember how her chest above the gown was flushed with red spots from the emotion; I never saw that happen to her before or since). I didn't want to throw the garter, even. I wanted to stop and scream over and over, no, no, no, something is not right. I couldn't place it to anything, but I felt it as deeply as I've ever felt anything, from the rehearsal dinner through most of the wedding itself.

I listened to what I thought was reason, and did in fact cut our cake, young hands together, new gold rings, bouquet on the table.

My girlfriend from high school came to my wedding, married five years since and with at least two children by then. We danced. My new mother in law cut in when she actually pulled me close during a slow dance, as if testing the feeling. Not body to body close, but close enough to smell her hair. She said she was surprised how beautiful my new wife was; everyone said that. Barbie Doll. I should have been very happy, ecstastic, but inside my terror, even misery, was enormous.

And then we climbed into the car her parents gave us a few weeks before and drove to the Ramada Rennaissance for our first night together. Many of those details I will not share here, perhaps when I am much older, but some I must. But next time. This has gone long enough. The echo of my dream has dissipated. I want water and perhaps some more sleep.

Peace to all. Much story remains.