My diary continues: “I wake up with a terrible hangover, 8 a.m., deathly ill. No work. I visit my car, getting a ride from Jim and I decide to keep it. Dinner at ‘La Pena’ again with Dale. We plan a walk but step into her place at 9 p.m. and by chance check out channel nine where ‘Brideshead Revisited’ is just starting, the very first episode. The previous day we’d talked of catching it but we had no T.V. guide to find out when, so this was quite a lucky coincidence. (another miracle) We watch it drinking Brandy, lying beside each other on her bed. Much delight in the show, much commenting on it. Afterwards we start kissing and hugging to a half-watched Western. I go home at two”.
“Tuesday: I tow the car with Steve and his truck. Dale comes to my place at ten p.m., wine, omelettes, talk and kissing till she walks home at two a.m.. Wens. Thurs. Friday hard work digging a foundation under a house for Robert Malone, me and John Seebach. Friday night Dale and I go to the ‘Omnivore’ restaurant, excellent dinner, Muscadet, then to her house with cognac and we make love. Sat., a ‘James Bond’ movie (at her house, in bed with her. I had no T.V. and she had no chair). Sund: at the bar with her at ‘Larry Blakes’, upstairs on the couch, fondling. Mond. Tues. Wens. hard work. It’s July 20th Dale comes over to my house at 9p.m.. We buy a pint of whiskey. Mike and James drop by, then some music playing, Mike very drunk and obnoxious. We get speed at midnight from the warehouse. Jim and John bring it and leave after ten minutes. Laurel keeps coming in and out, (for lines, but not wanting to be around Mike in his boasting, incoherent, blathering state. She’d seen too much of it and was sick of it. Everyone could see by now the beginning of the end) Mike and I and Dale get high and happy. Dale and I go to the ‘White Horse’ (just around the corner, a sleazy bar) for drinks and beers for a half hour and intimate talk. We go back to Mike’s and Laurels pad, listening to him strum (incoherently), more talk and lines till 5:30 a.m.. Dale and I finally alone together, much talk in bed, I call in sick for work, more lines and blissful embraces all morning. This afternoon I walk to the Med., and write this account, (the last five pages), still high, very happy, with many pleasurable prospects ahead. Before Dale leaves she runs into Ed and Brigitte and agrees to house sit for them for four days as they’re off on some trip”.
I finish off the entry with a bit of reflection: “This cannot happen to me often, this deep falling in love. I hope the violence of it” (we were having good sex each night, the drugs of course assisting), “unlike I’d ever experienced before or since will not mean it’s short lived. I hope it may mellow into a long relationship, close and radically different from my life of the past six months”.
So here we have the first impressions from the very battlefield of emotions and my present hopes recorded, to be re-read with pleasure or with pain a year from now.
(My fears were true. It was too passionate, or ‘violent’ to last, and I did re-read it with ‘pain’. But the affair did inspire my few good love poems. I never showed her these poems but wished I had, because in every sense they belonged to her.)
I add one more quote which shows again that my love was moved most of all by something very akin to ‘pity’. “Her fading youth, her fragile health, (she had spent years in India in the late sixties, studying meditation and had suffered from serious gastrointestinal disorders ever since), her reckless partying, as if grasping at one last, desperate straw of youth, and her sometimes sadness, crossing her face like a cloud for a moment, for no reason I could discern, all contributed to my total infatuation with her”.
I remember how she lay beside me, in my arms that morning and her favorite music, Beethoven’s 7th was put on and we turned it up loud, caught up in the emotions. Then the second movement began and her ‘flentibus lacrimis’,(crying tears) and my sympathy for her, her tears wetting my shoulder, and nearly evoking my own.
I must have meant to say ‘fluentibus lacrimis’, (flowing tears) but so it was written. Grammar goes all to hell when one is love-struck.
