VI. Moving to Alaska

VI. Moving to Alaska

Several things indicated that fate was motivating this move to Alaska.  For one thing, that summer I was going to lose fully half of my students. This  kind of thing  had been happening every few years for as long as I could remember; since many of my students were the children of graduate students, every once in awhile they all graduated and left town at the same time, of course, taking their children with them.  These students were fairly quickly replaced by new recruits, the following Fall, and my schedule again filled up--but this time it was even more severe than usual, and I was worried what the Fall held in store for me. The move to Alaska alleviated that problem.  There were still plenty of people who were sorry to see me go, but not near enough to keep me, if there were a new opportunity in store.  The fact is that my take-home pay from the school district  in Bear Creek  was going to be slightly less than what I was making freelance in Idaho; but the fact that my teacher's salary included income-tax taken out, and very cheap medical benefits, more than evened the scale. Anyway, it was Alaska at last.

The move up there was going to be expensive, but thanks to the Howard money, we had a lot of that covered.  Tina managed to find us a nice new Subaru through a private party who would take half payment now and half payment in January when the second installment of the Howard money was going to come in, so we had a cool $6,000 to get everybody where they had to go by September.   We had income tax to pay, lots of moving expenses,  first and last month's rent  where I was going to be moving in, and lost income for August and September to compensate for, but still it was just enough.  

Not only did we not get to pay off any significant credit-card debt, Tina incurred more debt by stocking up on a menagerie of period knick-knacks.  The idea was that she was going to furnish her little apartment in San Jose with a stockpile of memorabilia, in order to put herself in the mood for writing the part of her book which took place in the '20s in San Francisco.  None of the pieces cost very much, a  love seat here, a brass tea tray there, a poster, a trunk; but by the time she was done she had spent more than a thousand dollars on local color.  Hindsight showed this extravagance, too, to be a function of the manic phase of a bipolar episode, but who was I to object when she had just brought home the bacon in a major way, never mind that it was her doctor bills and drug bills and travel bills that were the main cause of our indebtedness? Be that as it may, by August 10th I was in Bear Creek and Tina would soon be in San Jose. 

I immediately found a cute little cabin-like house in one of the so-called “neighborhoods” of Bear Creek, and plunged  headlong into preparations for revitalizing the music program.   It turns out the  music students of the district had had a different music teacher every year for six  or seven years, so the first question anybody ever asked me was "Are you going to stay? " I was asked this so much I began to wonder if I actually was going to stay; I intended to stay, I wanted to stay, I didn't think I had another new beginning  left in me.   Tina and I agreed that this was probably our last chance, and if either one of us blew this, our life was pretty much over.  Yes, I was going to stay.  I will skip over the preliminary preparations I went through to get myself ready to take on a brand new job, (the most difficult aspect of which was that I was going to be teaching wind instruments from scratch, something  I had never done before), and move straight on to Tina's first visit. 

It was about the second or third week of September; school had been in full swing for several weeks, and I had established a comfortable routine for myself.  Already the high school band was sounding twice as good as it had ever sounded before, and the other beginning groups and the choral groups around the district were getting off the ground as well.  Tina was coming for two weeks, after getting her apartment in San Jose set up and establishing contacts with the English department and the fellowship  management. She insisted on renting a car, and driving out to Bear Creek in it, because she had to drive on to do an interview with an old timer in Eagle; it was important for her book.  She was going to be gone a couple of days.   She was going to stay in the  apartment above  the Historical  Society.  A couple of days turned into a week; every night I would get a call telling me that the old guy she was trying to interview was still off moose hunting and hadn't come back.   "That's the way they do things in Alaska, " she said.  " No sense of time.  I'll just have to wait.  " 

Of course, dear reader, if you've been paying attention, you know that Tina was beginning to spin a web of lies.  Asylum in the Woods details all the thorny conglomeration of lies she concocted—lies that went all the way back to that first night in Eagle. Over the past month and a half her phone calls to Dan Tucker in Eagle were getting longer and more involved, and her fascination with him was becoming irresistible.  They didn't even know for sure what they intended to do with each other once she got there; Tina was a fairly straight laced, morally upright person, and Dan Tucker, 43-year-old  repressed fundamentalist Christian, was still a virgin.  But she found in him something she had dreamed of her whole life: an honest-to-God mountain man with no pretensions, no guile, and no neurosis--he was really too stupid to be neurotic, and that was fine with her.  Moreover, he was kind of pathetic in an attractive puppy dog way, and her heart went out to him in his loneliness, and his to her in the magnanimity of her gift to him--love for the first time in his life. 

It cannot be said that Dan was to blame for any of this.  Tina was the aggressor right down the line:  she told  the lies, she rented the car, she made the trip, she came to him, and she worked very hard to overcome his powers of resistance to seduce him, to show him how to make love to a woman.  He must have learned quickly, because when she got back to Bear Creek she refused to make love to me because she had a bladder infection, the excuse she often made when she didn't want me, or she had been fucking too much and was sore.

I was so happy to see her, yet nothing I could say failed to elicit a negative response.  I had no interest in friction, in fighting, but fight we did, and fairly relentlessly.  I was so massively disappointed that she had given up half of her vacation with me to  some of moose hunter in Eagle, and that she had spent the other half in conflict with me, that I could barely believe that she was finally here in our dream place and was intent on ruining it.  I'm sure I played my part as well, because I was still the same old asperger's musician, dense, blind—but, even so, I really think I should known that something was terribly wrong.  

VII. 25th Anniversary

Sometime during that early fall, Tina  sent me a cute pin-on button; it said, " I looked forward for years to getting the salary I'm starving on now." That sentiment summed up a quintessence of my experience those first few months in Alaska.  My check every month seemed so huge, because I had never before got that much money all at once; yet after all the bills were paid, money sent to our sons, money  sent to her, there was hardly anything  left for me to live on.  I ate nothing but macaroni and cheese for three months, and lost a lot of weight.  And still she made demands.  Money seemed to slip through her fingers like water, and she relied on me to pay her rent after the first Steinbeck money disappeared (for all  I know on plane tickets to Eagle).  Our anniversary was at the end of November, and she wanted me to fly down to San Jose for three days so we could see again, together, the places we had visited on our honeymoon 25 years ago.  Even though she was insistent, I could not understand why she would rather pay six or seven hundred dollars for three days, when for less money she could come and spend much more time with me in Alaska.  I would have liked to come, but I just couldn't see how we could afford it.  This she considered a betrayal, and there was more to come.  

She finally consented to come to me for our anniversary and spend a week, before she had to return to San Jose for a reading.  It was a pretty miraculous meeting, really.  In  the middle of the night I picked her up at the airport, a four hour drive from Bear Creek, and on the way home she took off  practically all  her clothes in the car, and gave me a magnificent hand job, her beautiful breasts bouncingly illuminated by the light of the speedometer.  This type of uninhibited behavior was a feature of our Thanksgiving vacation together.  She seemed strong.  She seemed interested in me.  She got to see my beautiful snow-covered neighborhood, the woods the river, the inert fish wheel, the  moose tracks.  We spoke once again of her book, and the money she would use to buy property in Eagle, a retreat, a private place of her own, from which she would come to me for our occasional connubial meetings. 

In her short time with me in November, she managed to make friends with the mother of one of my most gifted students, and got us invited to Thanksgiving dinner at their home, the Bear Creek Lodge.  Things went well.  I accompanied Susan as she sang Christmas songs, and other standards, for about an hour, and then we all had a luscious Alaskan dinner.  I was making an Herculean effort to be sociable, in a situation in which I was intensely uncomfortable, and the conversation drifted toward literature, or something, I don't really remember.  But at one point I said something, and Tina  chose to disagree with me.  I said, in what I thought to be a jocular manner, "Sometimes I think you disagree with me for the sake of disagreeing with me."  Tina was devastated.  She told me later that she had felt like  I had slapped her in the face.  It brought up in her memory  hundreds of times when I had made insensitive comments that embarrassed her in front of people.  Whatever positive connection she had made with  me that weekend, was destroyed, and there we were, back to our old dysfunctional selves, trying to reach each other through layers of resistance, misunderstanding, and bad history.  She went back to San Jose the next day, her heart broken again by the monster who didn't know his own strength.  

Things got considerably worse after that.  Our routine of at least one weekly phone call, was cut back to practically nothing.  And whenever we did speak, there were bitter recriminations on both sides.  She couldn't forgive me for not coming to San Jose for our anniversary, and for 1000 other things she couldn't tell me.   Every time I spoke with her, I asked her about the book, and every time I asked her she leapt down my throat, said it was  none of my business, that all I cared about was her damned book, that I didn't care about her, and that she couldn't write it anyway.  It was during one of these conversations that I spoke the words which shall echo through all time down the halls of infamy, "You owe me a book." The statement was laden with guilt-ridden  accusation.  I was pissed. Here I had supported her for so many years, protected her from menial labor jobs, and demeaning secretarial jobs, so that she could be free to pursue her art, and now there she was in an ideal location, with a career at stake, and she had the gall to tell me, "I can't write." “Well, you owe me a book.” She remembers this as the cruelest thing I ever  said to her.  I swear, my only intention of was to try to motivate her to get to work, and I admit it was pretty sleazy in its passive-aggressive manipulation.  Still, I had known her to rise to the occasion many times, and I really thought that she might respond to some kind of pressure.  I see now this was a terrible mistake, and I agree these might have been the cruelest words I've ever spoken.