Like Some Changed Familiar Tree (Estella's Story 3.0)

Hello S, this is the third post which has nothing for us; thanks for passing by the second.

Part two of this series is here.

I notice, as I begin my tenth, yes tenth, Aubrey/Maturin novel that my writing is being affected, even the way I talk, including to students; my diction feels more formal. O'Brian's style is so strong it's unescapable, the same reason Keats quit reading Milton. Only I'm not willing to quit. So far, I haven't rigged a grating for anyone with a late essay, though I am about ready to toss my scrub dogs overboard.

But while I have some free time, more on Estella.

***

And so we were married. Had a medium-large ceremony, a beautiful upper-middle class reception (her parents, not me or my hick family) and drove together to our hotel.

Oh, stepping down into the dark and oily haze, fluid-thick...who wrote 'the old pain moves in me again...'

There were a few sweet things. I remember that we asked everyone for money, all the relatives at least, to pay for our honeymoon. My aunt B had donated a time share in Tahoe so our condo was free, but there are so many expenses to any trip like that and we had, truly, no money. I was making 8 dollars an hour working at a flying club at the airport (handing out keys, mostly; afraid to fly even then). E was working at a bank. Somehow the punch bowl got misplaced, in which were all the cards with their precious checks, and all we had was the cash from the money dance in a bridal white pouch with a nylon drawstring purchased for that occasion. (It is amazing, truly, all that comes in the distinctive bridal white, everything from pumps to panties to guest books). I remember thinking it was our first bank account. Her father, much to his credit, told us to use his credit card and we'd work it out later, but when we got to the hotel there was a message soon enough: the cards had been found. A friend brought the checks over the next morning.

The room we were supposed to have was not vacant. E was standing there in her dress in the lobby of the Ramada Renaissance and I was still in my tux, and we just kept pushing. I had reserved this special mini-suite weeks, maybe months, in advance. I have to say, the terror of the ceremony had mostly passed, though I doubt I was relaxed. I was never relaxed then. And here was this squirrely clerk telling us over and over that he couldn't get us one of those rooms. E, amazingly, as a small supportive crowd began to watch the debate unfold actually said, 'but it's the first time.' She may have said more, but she certainly said that. And she said it so openly. She confessed, without emotion it seemed, to a dozen strangers that she was in fact a virgin bride. Perhaps it's not so odd; it seemed odd.

Jumping ahead a little: what was surely odd was when her girlfriend came the next morning to deliver the checks and pick up the dress and the tux and E stood stark naked in the bathroom in front of the mirrors, door open, the light on, casually brushing her hair. E's girlfriend, a young woman from church who I learned later had in fact had a number of lovers, and wrestled with guilt because of it, (and who I wish all the best to now, wherever she is) was put back, even shocked. I believe E knew she was being provocative, ingenously nude in front of this woman and I; the friend and I exchanged a glance or two.

We never got the mini-suite, but we did get a comped room on an upper floor, free robes and I think maybe some champagne (though we didn't drink, we must have that night). And while I've thought long about how much I'd include here, I've decided on only the minimum. The most poignant moments and words will have to wait for another time. I like to write and talk about sex frankly. Why not? But some things, especially broken ones, deserve shadow even sixteen years later. Or maybe it's O'Brian. Would it be different if I were working my way through Henry Miller?

The first night we did not have intercourse. I figured that was okay; I had read the kama sutra which recommends waiting with a new lover. We had fifty years ahead of us. I had experienced the female orgasm from my teenage relationships, certainly I knew plenty about my own, and I did try with her, but she'd build and then it wouldn't happen. It never did happen the three years we were together as man and wife. In fact, if anything, our sex life began to slide downward from its awkward and stumbling beginning. We did have sex the second night after I brought it up jokingly (she had just taken her birth control pill, and I began to tease her about why). I genuinely believe I was gentle with her. It was my first time too. She cried after. I cried. I remember reaching orgasm and thinking: oh my god, sperm in the womb...she might get pregnant. Not likely on the pill, but my mother's old horror stories about never, ever, getting a girl pregnant came back to me even in that moment.

By our third night we were in Tahoe, and awkward became bizarre, even tragic. It was clear she didn't like sex with me, wasn't curious or didn't know how to get me to aproach her correctly. I remember we only had intercourse one other time on our honeymoon, and she propped up George, my little stuffed-animal inner-child monkey, on the lightstand above the bed beforehand. She wanted him present, which now actually makes me angry. She, we, knew so little about love, but what comes naturally to most couples did not come naturally to us. There was a very strange time she sat with me naked in the empty bathtub; it didn't feel adult, or mutual, or open. And she had nightmares several nights. I think I remember one night she got up and went into the living room of the little condo and curled up in a ball. The old film The Fly was on tv and she saw the final scene with the tiny man in the web squealing, 'help me, help me.' This affected, horrified her. I know I went to the casinos by myself a couple of the nights and ate off a taco cart.

And then one afternoon we went climbing on some rocks along the lake. I can still see her, a girl long since gone, one I can't even picture as she is now, sitting on a granite boulder, her gorgeous blonde hair blowing back in the wind, still with her wedding hair cut, and me raising my voice, 'but I feel as though you're pulling away from me, like I'm being abandoned.' She just smiled awkwardly, stared ahead as if I were asking a supertanker to stop in ten feet of water. Whatever forces were at work in her she didn't understand, or she couldn't control, or she wouldn't share. Perhaps she was already blaming me, a genuine possibility; I'm sure I was blaming her and myself at some deeper level.

Could I have been different? Would I be different now? Yes, I would. Though I'd see her anxiety and reticence as a very dangerous sign and head immediately for professional help (she was of course seeing Keith, but then he later showed himself a predator, and I don't know what would have been worse, if he had taken her or if things fell out the way they did and that honor was left for Robert, our second therapist). But driving home I remember yelling, even, I think, hitting the armrest in the car, crying, saying that she wanted me to hand all my sexuality over to her. And she did. She needed a sexually neutral Troy, perhaps a father or therapist or friend, certainly someone without sexual needs. And by that time...shit I needed a lover. I had sexual needs so deep and complex I didn't even understand them.

When we returned I tried to stay upbeat; I rarely quit at anything, and when things are darkest I'll look for that one ray of sun. Sure not much had happened for a honeymoon, but I figured we'd get better. A church buddy of mine helped me unload the luggage, a guy already married and someone I knew had long been attraced to E, and he asked me, 'well, so, how was it?' Fair question. I told him, 'it was okay, we only did it twice, but it's just our first week.' He replied, 'twice, we did it three times our first night.'

Ah, yes.

I actually believe that I didn't begin making excessive demands on E sexually as she later claimed (and I got this info third person; I can understand now she must have felt that way); I became depressed because I didn't know what else to do. First denial, then obsession, then my first major depression just nine months into our marriage. I still hold a lot of shame about my behavior in the marriage, but really, I was doing my best and I shielded her from so much rage, from truly strong demands that she change. Once when she started crying, openly admitting she had a problem (which was not common, usually it was glares at me) I told her, don't worry, we'll work it out, we'll figure something out. I am that kind of man.

Most important of all, I didn't kill myself during those dark months and years. Though my depression that next summer was extreme, and when I wasn't in school and using that to prop me up, became extreme again and again. I had a series of major depessions, and I survived, though I want to tell that tale in more detail in another series. For sure, my powerful depressions put pressure on our relationship, strained as it already was.

Our first year together was hard in other ways. The first time she casually asked me to empty the trash I went into a rampage, a complete mind-fuck, frankly, talking like my mother. But it lasted maybe ten minutes, and I knew then it was sick, and that I didn't want to talk like that. But oh those old tapes, the old vicious and cutting voice. I don't think I over reacted like that again. Perhaps I felt depression was a better alternative. As it could have killed me, there had to be a better way, some medium being hating her or myself. Therapy, right?

She continued seeing Keith; she began a women's group in our home for incest survivors; these I supported, though I began arguing with her about her incest again. I'd say, 'but there's just something about the way you talk about it that makes me think this is some other issue.' That's what I said. She still had no concrete memories, and I was young and angry and horny and astonishingly disillusioned and disappointed, and uneducated in things survivor, and that's just what I said when we fought over it. Sex, maybe, happened once a week, but it was like dragging her up a hill before, during, after. And that frequencey quickly diminished. Years later she told me that every time we did it she re-experienced her incest; she did not tell me that while we were married. She didn't say much of anything that specific.

She began to lose weight when she didn't need to, became incredibly constipated.

My own soul-shredding disappointment...I remember more than once taking a swim by myself in the pool in our building (we never lived at Ransom together but instead moved into Club J, a building full of Bethany people, and a move, a providence, which again may have saved my life) and coming out with the alive feeling, my senses tuned and my mind and body aroused (what is it about water that does that) and going into our apartment and knowing there was no way it was going to happen. Desire fueled her fear. There was so much fear. I made scary faces when we made love, she'd say. (Though one other time I remember her saying she wanted me to look in her eyes during, and it felt difficult, but then so much was resented by then). Another time she saw a shadow on our screen cast by the telephone wires and thought it looked like a sailor, hanging with a broken neck. Very abstractly and grotesquely, it did. Once, laying in bed, we actually heard the doorknob to our shut bedroom door click as though someone bumped it. We both froze in bed in terror, neither one of us able to move for long minutes.

There was some more mutual sex, yes. Oddly enough, usually when we went someplace else. In the early couple of years, a few times, we'd go to a motel for a retreat or when travelling and have long, long sex (though still without her ever coming). This didn't happen often because we didn't stay in places like that often. What I couldn't figure out was why this was the case? Why did she shut down sexually in our house but act so differently in a strange room, even, once, her old room at her parent's home? I never uncovered the answer to that. I'd read books about frigidity in the CSULB library and come across some strange theories, though the best seemed to tie back to childhood trauma. Perhaps her abuse occured in a home, and our home felt like that home.

Of course, in all relationships all problems are mutual, and I know if I had listened to her, I almost said humored her and forgive me still, by letting her off the hook sexually, completely, she might have relaxed and been able to heal; I tried to do this; later she blamed the fact that she was the same after three years together largely on me. I was deeply saddened, but I really think I could have had sex two or three times a week with her, especially if she enjoyed that time, and been fine, even in the beginning; less later. Not bad for a 25 year old guy who had never gone all the way. But I'll never know what might have been or what I actually needed; a cold lover feels cold. What actually happened was that things got worse and worse, my depression took up so much of the stage, and she never talked about her hard feelings. She didn't tell me what was going on in her head. I know my anger scared her, and that was part of it, but I didn't know how pissed and horrified she really felt towards me. Everywhere I went people were impressed with my wife, told me how lovely she was, but I lived a near-celibate suicidal nightmare.

There were a few touching times. Once we watched a movie called the Emerald Forest; in it, a teenager 'marries' a young girl in a jungle culture. They go off into the rainforest, begin touching and kissing, and then make teenage love on the forest floor. Watching that with me, E said one of the kindest things she ever said to me, a cry I could beat against God's door.

She said, 'I wish it was like that for us.'

And she meant it. But no matter what I tried or didn't try, it wasn't like that for us.

She would talk about how a woman she knew only felt like sex 'a couple times a month' (even though I knew from the husband the couple was fairly active). In some ways I was being hypnotized farther and farther from my sexual self, and I'm sure this was part of my depression. Predictably, I began to act out in old ways after a while: occasional porn video rentals, and I believe once just before she left me, phone sex, neither things I'm proud of. One night I even considered asking her to watch porn with me I felt so desperate; she was unlocking the front door while the video was on. I doubt that would have turned out well, but I fail to see how things could have gotten worse.

But mostly there was resentment and shock. One year into the marriage I remember attending a reception for another couple in the same room as ours at the Golden Sails. E and I sat on the steps outside, the sadness and grief so heavy I couldn't speak. Earlier I had danced the money dance with the bride of that day, a shy and even skittish girl who I knew was in therapy like so many of our friends, and when I asked her, truly innocently, where to pin the dollar bill she said relaxed and casual, 'you can pin it any place you want.' That girl was ready to be married, ready for her husband/lover.

Also, I remember I never wanted to watch the wedding video; even hearing the audio once in our car made me so angry and depressed; it reminded me of how I was exploding inside. At one dark point I told her I felt like she tricked me into marrying her: she had the husband, but I had no wife. That hurt her for a long time.

But this is getting overlong, and back to therapy. She was seeing Keith, a Christian therapist we found through our church. I began seeing him again when my first major depression hit, and he walked me through those first mind altered weeks. Not long after I got a call from him saying there was a meeting at my church that night and 'it was in our best interest to attend.' At the meeting the pastor who married us told a room with probably fifteen people in it, all clients of Keith's, that he was sexually involved with a patient. And he painted it in dark terms: attempted suicide on the patient's part, two homes broken apart, the relationship continued active. That almost killed me. I paged Keith and with E standing by watching tears and snot run down my face I told him 'this makes me want to hurt myself even more, to get back at you.' I was insightful. And he talked with me about it, but I saw him only once more as a client. And I told him at the final meeting I thought he was the Mozart of therapy, that I was going to write him a memorial poem greater than Tennyson's famous piece. Fuck him. I should have been screaming and overturning bookcases; I should have shown up with a lawyer. Turned him in to authorities. I just couldn't even think that way then.

I found another therapist (this was the second time that the lead therapist in the office couldn't fit me in and found me one of his people), Robert. Robert did help me, as did Keith, and I need to talk about him in much more depth, but this story is about my three years living together with E (only one more installment will be required I believe).

Robert encouraged me to let my anger out freely. I remember him kneeling on the floor and pounding the couch with his fists to show me what he meant. My urges to hurt myself were so strong then, almost unbearable, how I resisted I still don't know. But Robert's idea was to hurt something else. So I started carrying around a kneeling pad gardeners use (my first pad was E's, and she disliked that I was pounding it). When things got too bad I'd bust it out, even on third floor of the MacIntosh building at State in my adjunct office, and pound it until my urges to hurt myself diminished. And they did, for a while. Eventually I got a heavy bag, a boxing bag, and hung it in my garage. Every day, some days twice a day, I'd beat the crap out of that thing. This was helping. I'd feel the overhwelming pain and the urges, and I'd put on gloves and Nirvana and beat the bag wildly, great swinging hooks, not boxing, just slugging. Then I'd get through another day, or another few hours, before I had to do it again.

The only problem was that E was scared of my anger, so if I'd hit the arm of the couch during one of our rare but awful sex arguments...you see. She distanced herself farther from me, became very young. She began to try and find a therapist after Keith but had no luck; one lady even fell asleep on her during session. She knew another woman who was seeing Robert and she wanted to begin also. I had very bad feelings about that idea, but I agreed to let her meet him. He had mixed feelings, but he said he'd meet with her once, talk to her and then me about how it felt. He never talked to me about how it felt. She saw him once and was instantly hooked. She started bringing pictures of him home that she had taken in the office; a pillow, too, she began sleeping with. And now just under three years into our marriage, she started seeing him as a client in April, all rare sex came to a complete stop. She rapidly withdrew. I remember her coming home from an early session with him crying, crying to me, saying he had said that 'wow, he didn't believe you were molested, I can see being very angry with someone about that, so angry you wouldn't even want to be friends.'

That was Robert's therapy. Uncork everything, and fuck everyone but him.

That summer, our last together, 92, was very bad. She was playing Enya every night trying to sleep; eventually she began sleeping on the couch to be away from me. I don't remember much fighting, just her crying and telling me it was too hard, the feelings were too much, one day after church, and her very remote moods. I actually lost weight and got a tan, thinking desperately and foolishly that if I looked very good she might yet turn towards me.

I finished my M.A. and was the oustanding English grad. that spring, but I couldn't stand anything to do with academics for a while and my depressions were still very bad. I scrapped Ph.D. plans and began working day construction jobs (with scooter, no less). I tried to find work week to week, and ended up at the worst job I've ever had (but one I greatly appreciated at the time) doing electrical work in bakeries. I hadn't been at that long when I came home one day, exhausted, greasy and with cut fingers from threading nuts by hand, aware that I sucked at this kind of work though I now had my tool belt to find the note on the mirror:

'Dear Troy,

I've gone to stay with friends for a while. Please do not try and contact me.

Estella'

Or close to that. A few weeks later I found a note in the back seat of our car (she took the car also, and a true Christian sold me his truck for 1,000 dollars so I could still go places) which was a draft of the above but the with words 'I promise to come back' added at the bottom. She had crumpled it.

More next time. I don't want to do this anymore right now.

t