The two trips in the move to Dallas were my one last fling though. I asked Bruno to accompany me, to share driving, with enough speed on hand to make the trip entertaining. We stopped in L.A. the first night to visit my dad and Muriel. I wanted them to meet Bruno, (show him off) and we had a few hours of good conversation at their dinner table. I stayed there the night but Claire was now living in L.A., studying to be a doctor. Bruno hadn’t seen her in many months and after a telephone call whisked off for a nocturnal visit.

Their break-up seemed odd to me. In the three years I knew them at the warehouse, and another year after that in a rented two-story house near campus, with one other occupant, a male student rarely there, they seemed a perfect couple. I never saw them argue and would visit that house my year in Piedmont at least twice a month, often with John Seebach. But a few months before I left for Texas they’d broken up, at Bruno’s insistence. He told us the relationship just fizzled out and he wanted a change. I was there one evening when he’d recently announced this to her. She was upstairs crying and he left us to talk to her, explaining the situation. When he returned I told both him and John that I thought it was a mistake.

Claire holding Willy.

After Bruno helped us unload in Dallas he stayed on a few days then flew home. But he flew back three months later and took Sanita on a three day trip to Mexico while I watched Willy. They were close and she wanted a break from me, so I agreed. I don’t know how close they got, staying in motels together. I’m sure they had sex but I trusted him as a good friend, so much so it didn’t matter. I knew she was sexually unsatisfied with me and if anyone could relieve that a bit I’m glad it was him. I knew they’d never hook up as a couple. She was far too different from him, just as I was. This trip was just a little interlude for both.

A dinner at Barbara’s in Dallas, with Jaime, myself, Kitty, (Jack’s wife) Sanita and Willy.

During their absence I wrote Sanita a ten page love letter, spilling my heart out, telling her honestly of my deep affection for her in so many ways, and how I appreciated her so much. It was well written. After I gave it to her she read it in the kitchen, folded it up, never said a word in reply and I never saw it again. I thought this strange. I wish I could see it again as I spent much of two days composing it and I’m sure it had some fine, eloquence parts, though with little or no apparent effect on her.

Once again, too little, too late. If I were cruel I might say “pearls to swine”. But she deserves better as I know our break-up was as much my fault as hers, our incompatibilities impossible to overcome, though not through a lack of trying. Nothing could bridge the disparities in our minds and education. But her shortfall was never her fault. It was her poor upbringing and her parents. Maybe she still keeps that letter as a curio.

There was one other event during this three day absence too strange to omit. A few days before she left, she told me of this old girlfriend named Diane who liked to have sex with every one of her old boyfriends, (like some nemesis), before or after her relationship was over. She still lived in Dallas and Sanita said she wouldn’t be surprised if this woman came knocking on my door while she was gone, invite herself in and strip off her clothes in front of me.

I wondered about this strange prediction of her’s after she left. How would this Diane know we were in Dallas after so many years, know our address and that Sanita was away, unless she’d called her. Sure enough, on day two of her absence, there’s a soft knock on my door, early afternoon, just as I’m composing the aforementioned love-letter in the living room and Willy is taking his nap. She’s just as Sanita described her, a brown-haired, short and cute sex kitten, (if one can call a woman in her early thirties that), all dressed up and perfumed, asking if Sanita was there, her best friend, not seen in five years. When I tell her she’s away she asks in the most innocent manner if she could come in and see our new home and baby, just a peek.

Diane, Sanita's clever foil. Harrisonburg Housing Today.jpg

I can see a set-up when it’s not only foretold but obvious. I pause a moment, admiring her curves and, (still in the elevated clouds of my love letter) nobly decline the romp and its spiritual complications, telling her Sanita would be back in two days. She might want to return then. I started closing the door and she turned away with an obvious look of disappointment, almost anger. Perhaps it was a rare instance of her sex appeal being rejected. To this day I can be proud of that.

But as I resumed my chair it flashed upon me that this was Sanita’s ‘tit for tat’, her attempted repayment for what she might be doing with Bruno that very moment five hundred miles away, in Juarez, where they said they were going. And this thought actually warmed me, such consideration for me and a sense of justice in her, more than poetic, a physical trade-off to relieve her own guilt. When she returned I mentioned Diane’s visit and my reaction. She passed it off with a shrug, saying: “I knew she’d try that. She’s not coming back.”, as if it were all just coincidence. And Diane didn’t come back to see her dear, old friend. Case closed.

Yet looking back now from the perspective of thirty years, our love was doomed from the start and its breaking up was the best thing that ever happened to me, which I began to feel as soon as the shock and anger were over, several years after the divorce. I felt free, as if tight chains, crushing my chest for years had finally been cut loose and I could breathe again a full deep breath. I loved her beauty but our minds were a million miles apart. She had no education and I had it all, much too much to ever play the all-attentive, doting husband.

But it wasn’t just knowledge. She had little ability to reason or think straight, choose options with certitude, which paths to follow or which people to like or dislike or trust. She could never overcome this uncertainty and it left her with a troubling anxiety. In all my time with her I only witnessed a few occasions where she made a deliberate decision: when she fell in love with me, when she chose to have a child with me, when she chose to divorce me and when she fell in love with Mark Dudley.

In Santa Cruz I took her to a bank and set her up with a checking account with several thousand dollars in it. It was her first ever. She never asked for it but I thought it prudent that she always had access to money if I weren’t around.

The teller had to explain the check book to her. Her math abilities were that of an eight year old. So I fell into the habit of doing things for her and watching over her in new situations. It was a pleasant task when we were in love, but later on a burden I didn’t notice until I was free of it. My first assessment in that old journal was correct. She was a child, a beautiful one with a pleasant disposition and good character, but none the less a child.

I flew back to Berkeley two weeks after the move to Dallas to retrieve my Datsun, sitting in Steve’s driveway. This time Steve was my driving partner and another bundle of speed. We stopped at my father’s again. It was his eightieth birthday and there were some fifteen guests, mostly family. For presents we were told to each write a poem, to be recited to him. In my first week in Dallas I’d finally succumbed to her family’s constant nagging, especially Jack’s, that we become officially married. So we did, in a half hour, before a judge, Charmaine and Jaime as witnesses, no ceremony, only a five hundred dollar ring.

I had no poem prepared for this ceremony, so I made up a quick four-liner, the last line of which was: “Sanita and I got married last Friday”.

I made sure I was the last to recite in this crowd, so as not to take the wind out of other people’s poetic efforts. It made a grand impression.

That night Steve and I spent at Claire’s. He’d done so many lines on the eight hour drive down that he was up all night, reflecting on the fine, elegant family scene he’d witnessed, or perhaps on Claire laying in the next room. We stayed up late with Claire, catching up on old times at her kitchen table over beers. She was close to finishing her medical degree. She told us her years with Bruno were a ball and chain to any career. But she did love him madly for about five years, the totally infatuated first love of youth, never to be found again. I mentioned that maybe such love was more valuable than a career. We left it at that and went to our separate rooms and beds.

The next day we drove to Las Vegas, to gamble a few hours then to much needed sleep. But the next day, well rested up, we did many more lines and pushed it too hard, the car that is, driving twenty hours straight. We made it to Dallas the next day but the engine was shot. We forgot to check the oil. It was empty when we arrived. I sold that car a week later to some Mexican kid passing by on the sidewalk for a hundred dollars. It started right up and he drove off. He thought it was the luckiest day of his life, for a few days.

Once again I’d sent Sanita ahead to find a house, and she picked a bland one, the bottom half of an old Victorian with the landlords, an old couple, living upstairs, but in a neighborhood with no life or color.

Once again, to give Sanita the space she seemed to need for her nearly idle, empty days, I rented another separate room in the house with its own private entrance and read Herodotus in Greek six hours a day. It was the last time I studied Greek in earnest, filling pages with notes. It was my last period of pure study. After that it was either work or writing that filled my days.

We made no friends and didn’t socialize in the whole nine months there except for one night out with Charmaine and Jaime to a bar, from which I was kicked out for falling asleep at a table, a unique experience for me, (only in Texas does this happen), and a New Year’s Eve party with some crazy French wine merchants Jaime had met and befriended, so much so that we had the small get-together at their warehouse, opening bottle after bottle of very expensive wines.

We had a few dinners with Jaime and his new girlfriend, Barbara. He went through many. She was a better catch then most because she had an administrative post with Texas Instruments, climbing higher up the corporate ladder every year. She owned a nice condo and we enjoyed her fine wines. Barbara loved seeing Willy, being childless, career coming first. I helped Jaime remodel a few kitchens for rich clientele. He made fancy wood counters from Brazilian hardwoods, cut into four inch thick slabs, with all their beautiful rings lacquered, now water and cut resistant.

But these jobs only filled a few days of a few months. Life was stagnant for Sanita, friendless and bored, and I must admit, of all the places I’ve lived, it was dull for me too. There is no night life in Dallas. The central city is a ghost town after dark, Deep Ellem hardly better. So if you like chain restaurants and a hundred liquor laws requiring licenses for each one, along two lane strip mall streets, all tasteless and the same, Dallas, or any ugly new place in America is your town, culture be dammed.

Our next move was imminent.