I was fortunate (in a way) because our fast growing business in San Juan kept me so busy, comfortably afloat financially, and kept my mind off Sanita most of the week. But our divorce did proceed apace. Sanita stayed in our house since I was gone most of the time. She drove Will to a private school in Mayaguez everyday. It was half-English, half-Spanish classes, for rich kids. She made friends with Laura, Sammy’s mother, and they took turns driving the two boys every other day, so she had plenty of time to herself.

The first lawyer we visited was in Mayaguez. We simply picked his name out of a phone book. He was fat, ugly and looked like a crook in his big, richly ornamented office, comfortably sitting behind a huge desk. He was a cigar smoking sixty-five year old. He told us the matter would cost us over a thousand. But then he went on to say that he didn’t believe in mutual consent divorces and that the law for such was never ratified by their parliament, although most judges allowed it and stamped it as final. He wanted an air-tight case for us.

Then he turned to me and told me that I should swear to the judge that I beat my wife regularly and viciously. “but that would be a lie”, I said, “I never hit her once”. “But that’s what you have to say” he goes on, “for a clear cut case”. I looked at Sanita, we stood up and left his office for good. Shyster lawyers, the scum of the earth, telling us to lie to judges, to complicate matters and make more money for themselves. I wonder how many simpletons followed his advice and went to jail or went broke.

Back in Rincon, after a few inquiries, we found a very nice woman lawyer our age who said she’d handle the easy affair for three hundred dollars. We both agreed and in one brief, pleasant chat, I offered Sanita the top half of our property, the car and four hundred dollars a month child support, with full visitation and sharing rights whenever convenient, in other words dual custody. The one proviso was that neither of us could take him off the island without the other’s full permission and a renegotiation of visitation terms. This seemed perfectly reasonable and fair to both of us, case settled. We parted all smiles, like the best of friends, not your usual, ugly divorce proceedings.

Our court date happened to fall on the day before my fortieth birthday. If you like to snippet the different states of your existence into decades, this one worked out perfectly.  There were twenty people in the large room all waiting their turn. Ours came up first. We were prompted by our lawyer to stand before the female judge and say in turn that we both desired a mutual consent divorce. Sanita was asked first and said the simple “Yes”.

But I wasn’t comfortable with that and when the judge turned to me and asked the same question, I said “No, I don’t want it as I still love her”. The judge, taken aback and a little amused, said to me, “You were supposed to say “Yes”. Our lawyer, standing next to me, whispered nervously that I had to agree to it. Then, assuming a noble, Roman air, I spoke in a slow and proud tone: “I thought a courtroom was a place where one is supposed to tell the truth”.

The judge laughed out loud and smiled at me, then she stamped the divorce papers and handed them over to the clerk. Our case was closed and finalized, and our lives now set on two, new, divergent courses. With the first four hundred dollars, which I gave her right away, she packed her things and took Willy to stay with a girlfriend that very night. Within a few more days she found a cheap and dingy rental house in the slum part of town. A month later she rented a much nicer house on a hill with a distant ocean view. That pleased her and she moved in, on the other side of Rincon, a five minute drive from my place.

I sat in my house that night and the next alone at my desk, with one dim desk lamp lighting the entire room, most of it in shadows, and the silence and void matching my emotions. It reminded me of my empty years in Niagara Falls and the small room on Victoria avenue. But pen in hand and undisturbed, I wasn’t dejected. I was contemplating my future, and such a significant turning point in my life, writing several pages of reflections upon it.

The second night I bought a small bag of coke, for my fortieth birthday, and stayed up late writing some ten pages. I wrote the first ones in Latin, vague descriptions of my altered state. Then I switched to English to be more precise, parts of it sad at my loss of both wife and youth, parts a little angry and others self-lamenting. Most of the stray thoughts were positive, urging me to quit drinking, (the opposite occurred) and build up a better life for myself, find new friends and better pastimes, now free of the shackles of Sanita and her subtle, cutting, disapproval of my ways, my drinking and partying and my circle of friends, which after she was gone expanded exponentially.

She never nagged at me. In the first place she had little if any cause. Besides providing everything for our family I did a good percentage of the daily chores that any stay-at-home housewife would have done. I actually enjoyed doing the dishes and making the bed, laundry too. It was because I sat at my desk so many hours or in a chair reading that a little physical activity was a welcome change. During our year in Piedmont my daily routine, after breakfast, which she rarely made, was to study at my desk the rest of the morning, make up a word sheet, then post it on the window behind the sink and review it while I washed the dishes, memorizing as much as I could, and enjoying each function simultaneously. For some reason she always hated cleaning dishes. Perhaps as a child she was forced to do them. I could tell by the way they piled up to pyramid shapes in our sinks that she despised that chore, so I took it on whenever I wasn’t working.

Besides that she was too illiterate to find the words for sharp rebukes I could reply to any of her comments with something ten times more cutting and to the point. So we never had verbal spars. It was against my kind character to engage in them. But the few times I did engage, defensively, by someone else’s rudeness or false assumptions or reasoning, I tore into my opponent with a barrage of sharp phrases and obvious truths.

This is one of those rarely used benefits of a university education and wide reading, the ability to insult and demean in quotes and quips when it’s appropriate. I know I used it jokingly with ‘C’ and ‘K’, (the lesbian), at times, and Lindsey and Cindy in their rages, and Victor in the office trying to demean me with shouting, (while ripping off our money). He used this common tactic quite often, to enrage the person you’re stealing from so they can’t think straight or see what’s going on, and actually convince them they’re unworthy of any better treatment, as if your a weakling and deserve to be ripped-off. But I’ll describe my few tactics against his verbal assaults in the following pages. I could manage them, but I was too honest and nice to deter his thievery, and with Jaime gone, in no position to do anything but leave, which I did.

Towards the end of our marriage Sanita showed her disapproval, (as all verbally limited people do), with gestures, with angry looks and cold shoulders, mean glances, refused hugs, sullen silences when questioned, or rudely walking away, or turning away in bed, the mute responses of the ignorant, the only thing they can do, and often as unsatisfactory a reply for her as it was to me, because there is no reply to such moves. She was showing her anger and unhappiness in mute glares, and I was equally unhappy because she was, and powerless to change it.

I have the pages before me. But they didn’t alleviate my one underlying and deep concern: what would happen with Willy? Was he out of my life or not? I was too upset to even approach this question. You can’t evaluate a shock and all its implications right after it happens. That takes months or years. I put down my pen and stared off into the gloom, towards the empty loft, then went to bed.

The next night, mildly high on coke, (I never did much, six or seven lines lasting me from evening till I went to bed around two a.m.), I tried to be my old self again, a journalist, meditating upon my situation, painting a picture of my heart and soul. After a few pages I realized, by the quality of the prose and succinct description that I was the same complete person I always was, a philosopher, rich in reading, acute in reasoning and myself my main concern. This calmed me quite a bit. I’d been in a panic that I was losing a great deal. I realized I was losing nothing.

Everything that's mine I carry with me: "Omnia mea porto mecum".

This was the quaint reply that some Greek philosopher made after his house burnt to the ground and he walked away unperturbed. This sanity also foretold that sooner or later I’d have my rights over my son and not lose him, as I was in his heart and mind, and far more the provider than she could ever be.

My diaries had always examined the world around me, my friends, my situations and lovers, but they centered upon me, not as an egoist but because I felt I was the only one whom I might truly dissect. Other people, my friends and chance acquaintances, or even those closest to me (like Sanita) were inscrutable for the most part. I didn’t know their true pasts, what experiences and circumstances or traumas shaped their young minds. I only had what little they told me, true or false, and that little only enough for a few conjectures. With Sanita it was even less. I was totally blind to her thought patterns and deemed it impossible to understand her. The best I could do was to sketch a few trends and habits. But even these changed over time.

For all the deep discussions I had with her in our first years, I never saw into her psyche and I know she could never fathom mine. It was built up upon the foundation of five hundred books she’d never know. We were too different. I had no clue why she always wanted to move. I just went along with it to keep her happy, hoping someday a reason might reveal itself. It never did.

How could I converse so much in my mind, (internal dialogue) and so little with the woman I loved? I could talk to John Seebach or Bruno or Steve for hours, on the deepest personal levels. It all comes down to gender, the feminine psyche, rightly called ‘mystique’. I consider it so alien and so different from a man’s that it’s undecipherable, as much as ancient Chinese to me. I don’t have the first clue as to how I might even begin to interpret it.

One mystery I note frequently in these pages is the female attribute of beauty, especially facial beauty, and the fact women always seem to know how much they have of it, and how powerful an influence it is over every man they meet, in varying degrees, depending on the man, but knowing how to use or abuse its power with their advancing levels of skills, smoothly and subtly mixing it with character traits and gestures, feminine charm, perfume, jewelry, and the wide array of clothes they might pick out, from elegant to sexy, tight or revealing for even more influence.

But it’s a trap for both the men they charm and themselves, an invisible hypnotic spell that often leads to disaster, for both captor and captive, as it was for me.

Sanita, inebriated and enticing.

Here’s why: It gives them a great power over another without the mind to use it wisely. They know it has irresistible influence over men. The men feel this too, show it, can’t resist and have no chance of escape, so they submit, but to what? To every frivolous and selfish demand it makes, sometimes gifts of clothes and jewelry, sometimes coke or other drugs, trips, yachts, or any frivolous pleasures, whatever the man can afford. But all these things are useless in improving the mind, ennobling the soul, finding a satisfying purpose to one’s life. At best they’re wastes of time, at worst, (with drugs and parties) they’re destroyers of minds. It makes some women tyrants in bed, and sooner or later hated for that tyranny.

This beauty one’s born with never urges self-improvement because it never has to. Its power was given ‘gratis’, without any reason, free. It controls without effort in the bloom of youth and with added charms and cheats (such as make-up) as time goes on. So it feeds its several appetites with whatever it wants. It shines out as an invisible force, like a gravitational field, to which men’s libidos are invariably drawn, and when sucked in close enough, captured and caged. They pay dearly in this captivity and when drained the charmer dismisses them, moves on to other prey, again and again.

I would say ‘forever’ but all beauty fades, on several levels. It fades in wrinkles with age, (just as Dale’s faded for me) and it fades with familiarity. Most men get tired of the same face seen daily, the same charms and tricks practiced over and over again a thousand times. Familiarity breeds contempt. So the women lose their power, turning from ‘predictable’ to ‘boring’ to ‘unpleasant’ then ‘disgusting’, and finally unwanted and abandoned. The cage bars vanish.

My brother-in-law Jaime had a saying, worthy of note. He slept with countless, beautiful women and was the one to come up with this fine aphorism. It went like this:

‘No matter how beautiful the woman, how gorgeous in every way, there’s some man somewhere on this earth tired of fucking her’.

This is the sad history of many women born with beauty, natural and unasked for. And I haven’t even brought up the matter of age, when they live well past that bloom and spend half a lifetime middle-aged, not so pretty, sharply feeling the loss, and sharper still old age with it’s complaints and pains. The only escape and resolution to this bleak fate is to develop internal resources of mind and character that never fade, talents and arts, wit and knowledge that can attract friends forever, if you want company or projects, or develop into satisfying hobbies, if you want solitude.

Jaime after his back injury.

A few men are born with this same magnetism, called ‘good looks’ or charisma. Kim had it and enjoyed it to the fullest, with one long, unending succession of both friends and pretty girlfriends, most often with free places to live and little need to work. But when I saw him last, in 1986, he was not happy, shacked up with a bartendress his age, (late thirties) of middling looks. We met in the bar she worked at, dark and dingy. He had the dejected look of a serious alcoholic now, (he had expressed concern that he would become one when we lived in San Diego together in 1980), and his girlfriend was not all that happy supporting him. She also handled his habit, as he told me, frank as ever, dolling out the beers he drank hour by hour, like a mother. He was worried about his future. I had nothing to reply, only commiseration. In fact, I was a bit disingenuous when I left with Sanita that mid-afternoon with a handshake, saying that he’d always been lucky in past years and that he’d probably be so in the future. It was a hope on my part but hardly likely. The fact that I never much thought about him after that tells the tale. It was too gloomy a picture to contemplate, the fairest companion of my youth, now prematurely and sadly aged.

I have no idea what happened to ‘Harry O’. But my brother-in-law Jaime had a similar sad end, starting shortly after forty and only getting worse, until death at sixty. These are the three who were born with obvious, glaring, good looks and charm. They all had great talents too, which they didn’t much cultivate because they didn’t have to. Everything came free.

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