VII. 25th Anniversary

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.