XV. Back to Pullman
Spring vacation came at the beginning of April, and, as far as the Steinbeck Fellowship went, Tina decided to throw in the towel. She had spent six horrific months in a megopolistic Hell Hole, had gone crazy, had driven us much deeper into debt, and in spite of all the fellowship money to show for it, she barely had two sentences to rub together, so to speak. I took an extra week off, using all four days of my personal time for the year, and went down to San Jose to move her out and to bring her up to Idaho.
There is a significant point to be made concerning this whole operation: one of Tina's main concerns, at this time, was that she was so blown away by the bipolar episode, that she had lost her mind; that is to say, the trauma to her brain was so severe that she had lost all ability to think clearly, to remember anything, to plan, to reason, to build and retain any sort of large-scale logical structure in her mind; she was convinced that all vestiges of her former self had completely disappeared. And yet, she devised and executed a very elegant, cost-efficient way of getting all her stuff, a considerable pile of stuff by this time, to Alaska. Renting a U-Haul truck to drive all the way up there was prohibitively expensive, so she shopped around San Jose, and for about the same money, found a used truck, bought it, and it was this that we loaded up to take north; the plan was to the move the stuff up, then sell the truck. She took care of all the complicated arrangements for dealing with this purchase, and she was so sweet and helpless, during the transaction, the dealer knocked $500 off the price. Now, granted, when it came to actually loading the truck, choosing what knick-knacks to put in what box, what to pack, what to throw out, she was indeed overwhelmed, and would never have been able to do it without me; on the other hand I would never have been able to buy a truck by myself. I say this to make the point that, in spite of her own estimation of her abilities, she was still a remarkably capable woman, and I was sure, with time to heal, she would gradually gain confidence and recover, nay, improve upon, the former self she thought she had lost.
We spent a whirlwind two days in San Jose, picking up the truck, dropping off a borrowed car, packing the truck, cleaning the apartment, sending off boxes by mail, and making one last visit to the therapist. I was on my best behavior, was open and talkative, and succeeded in getting Dimwitted Asshole to like me, or at least to pretend to like me. I was just about as underwhelmed by her as I expected to be, but she did give me some insight into the severity of the bipolar episode, and, additionally, a useful comparison between aspergers sequential thinking and normal circular thinking. It was an enormous physical effort loading that truck, eight to ten solid hours of carrying boxes up and down a flight of stairs, down the street half a block, and up into the truck. Normally Tina supervises this sort of project, because she is very, very good at piecing things together; she could not handle it, so that left the packing up to me, and I'm pretty lame at it-- consequently we had to reorganize two or three times before we got the stuff so it would fit. Anyway, by 9:00 that second night we were off.
As usual, when we traveled together, we got lost, and ended up driving all the way through San Francisco in that damned truck. This is the kind of situation in which I would formerly have freaked out big time, but I held in, kept it together, and got us through town and onto the highway, albeit the wrong highway. It didn't matter that we ended up going about two hours out of our way, because we covered a lot of material in those five hours on the road. During the two days we spent in San Jose, there was really no time to talk seriously, so the first time we really got into it was that night. We took turns going on crying jags, first she, then I would go on about how we had been betrayed, and the tears would flow, and the accusations would stab the midnight darkness. The most difficult thing for me to hear, was that she was dead inside and had no feeling for me whatsoever. I also began to glean from details she let drop, the magnitude of the deception she had worked on me in regard to Dan Tucker; it was like reading a spy novel, unraveling the tissue of lies she had woven to keep her secret--she had lied to me, misled me, and stolen from me, i.e. I had gone even deeper in debt to finance her love trysts with Dan Tucker—how many of which there were I have never been able to find out for sure.
Indeed, she insisted on keeping large blocks of the Dan Tucker narrative a secret from me. She had read a book somewhere that said betrayed spouses always have a morbid curiosity about their partner's affair, and it is better to say less than more. I eventually learned quite a lot, and came to understand the situation fairly thoroughly. I can't say the knowledge made me happier, because to find out how completely your loved one has treated you like shit, is painful knowledge; still, without understanding the affair as completely as I came to understand it, I don't know that I would ever have been able to forgive, or forget, or even deal with it at all.
We took three days to make it up to Idaho from San Jose. We spent two nights in motels; she wouldn't let me touch her, but we did seem to get back some of our team spirit which, through the worst, we had always maintained. We covered lots and lots of ground, but it wasn't until we had actually entered the outskirts of our old home town that it finally came out how close she had been to suicide, that it had been Dan Tucker who called 911 and saved her life. When it finally hit me, it was my turn to go hysterical; I couldn't breathe, I couldn't see for the tears, when we got to our house I couldn't eat; I kept seeing Tina's lifeless body spread out on that San Jose apartment floor, I kept hearing that official phone call from California asking me if I was the husband of Tina, there was bad news. She gave me three pieces of the puzzle all at once, that made it possible for my asperger brain to understand: she told me that she had a plan (she always follows through on her plans), she had a method (she had done the research on the Internet about which drugs and how much), and it was Dan Tucker who had called the police. With these three items pieced together, I realized how close I had come to losing her, and I was overwhelmed. I think this might have been the moment that the future Phoenix first turned completely to ash.
When I learned that Dan Tucker had saved my wife's life, a change took place in me. Suddenly, I owed this insignificant fur trapper not only my wife's life, but mine. Suddenly, the mystery of our interwoven fates was made plain, and I understood his role in my life, and realized that I would have to play a role in his. Meanwhile Tina's head state did not improve; she still had no feeling whatsoever for me, no gratitude, no affection, no attraction. Somehow she had always known she must give up Dan Tucker and return to me, but pined for him, unabashedly in my presence; she wept for him in a way she had never before and never ever would weep for me. A letter written to him about this time will reveal the depth of her passion for this man; the romantic intensity of it breaks my heart every time I read it, and I have read it many times:
March 9
Dear, dear Danny:
Just the thought of not being able to write those words anymore makes me cry, the same as the other day when I stood beside the trash-strewn Guadalupe River and turned my face to the sky and wept. No one was around—there never is in that green strip under the flight path—so I didn’t even try to stifle my sobs. I wish I could cry in your arms again. I know I have spent too much time doing that, but if there was ever a time I needed it, it is now. If there was ever a time I needed you, it is now when I have to give you up. How can I go through the difficult months ahead and not have my best friend there to help me through it? I need you, Danny, I need you. I want you. I love you. I miss you already. I miss making love with you so much I can’t bear it. Not the sex, just the closeness, your body against mine, our kisses that seemed to go on forever, our hearts as intertwined as our legs. I love you, Danny. I can’t help it. I can’t stop myself from wanting you. It seems impossible that I’m going to Alaska and will not be seeing you.
All this spring I will be imagining looking down on your little place, watching you go about your chores, greeting the dogs each morning, whistling as you round the corner of the cabin. In Bear Creek, I will watch the trees bud and leaf out and I will imagine the trees encircling the clearing turning a tender green. I will imagine Bitty and Smokey growing bigger and your woodpile getting smaller. I will see you peel off one layer of clothing after another as the weeks progress, until some delicious late spring day I will look down and see you working shirtless in the garden, bending to plant potatoes in the garden, your fine hands brown with the freshly turned soil. I will not be able to envision you in the bedroom, however, because I can’t, even now, see you there. Instead, I feel you in bed with me still. My face is pressed against your neck, my hand on your chest, feeling you breathe. Your breath and the rise and fall of your chest is as calming as the sound of wind in the trees, as the river flowing free after the ice goes. You made the ice go out of my frozen heart, Danny. You made my blood flow again, and yes, my tears, too. Better blood and tears than the emptiness I knew for too long. Now I will have both the emptiness and the tears, the pain so great I feel like I’m bleeding inside, somewhere so deep that no one can see. I love you, Danny. Yes, I love you. Yes, yes, yes. You are my lover, my soul mate, my confidant, my constant in the midst of unending turmoil. You are my friend. You are mine. You are my Danny. You will always be my Danny.
Love,
your Eagle Girl
Even now, as I read these words, I choke back the tears speaking into the dicta-phone. It is hard to believe the woman I have adored for twenty-five years wrote these words to someone else. She has justified it many times by saying that she can't possibly have the same kind of romantic feelings for me, who lays claim to a deeper more permanent love than Dan Tucker ever may, because we have been together too long, and however you cut it, the thrill is gone. I say bullshit--I believe I am more passionately in love with her now than I have ever been, and I have a dozen letters and love poems written to her that are on the same level of intensity as the one above written to Danny. Nevertheless, knowing how much this man had come to mean to her, and hearing her night after night regret his loss, I came to a momentous decision: I told her that I would rather have a piece of her than nothing, and that I would try to share her with Dan Tucker.
Her reaction to this statement was the only positive emotion I saw in her during the two weeks we spent together. She told me that this development made it feel as though a great weight had been lifted from her stooped shoulders; she couldn't believe what a good person I was, and, trust her, she really could love two people at once. I want to emphasize this: she really could love two people at once. She even fucked me that night, the first of many gratitude fucks. To prove my sincerity, I even took things one step further: there had never been any question of the two of us making it all the way to Alaska on this trip; she was going to have to come up on the ferry in about a month, drive through Canada, and meet me in Bear Creek in five weeks; I was worried about her making this trip by herself, especially the long drive through Canada, so I suggested she arrange for Dan Tucker to meet her in Skagway and accompany her on the long drive; they could, of course make love as much as they wanted, and I would deal with it. She made the arrangements, and was like a different person after that. I guess, if you love something, you have to let it go. God does that suck.
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