Love
I wrote that I was placing my hopes and future in her but knew that this implied a loss of former hopes, including my plans to be a solitary, full-time writer (which it did). How fickle our lives were, like leaves in the wind. Then I noted, ironically, that I was writing this Latin right under her nose and she would never read it. I even added that I’d get better at Latin composition with practice and would write much more fluently soon, in my own secret language. My mind was racing on many different levels, as one always does in love.
Then I recorded Diane’s call the night before and the even greater irony of that. Finally I noted her moments of self-doubt and poor self-esteem, (perhaps from the trauma she’d just been through of which I knew nothing). I also noted a confusion in her thinking at times, indecision when presented choices, which I would have to deal with but also her pure, loving, smiles whenever she looked at me.
Actually, the Latin isn’t that bad in parts. Too bad I never kept up the practice. It would have quickly improved. The only other time I reverted to it was when Sanita was divorcing me, exactly ten years later, in 1994.
But these journal notes only reflect a hundredth of my reality. We were like two teenagers in love, in the house together constantly hugging, or if we had to go out and get something, hand in hand. Word got out of the new girl and we had a stream of steady visitors, checking her out and wishing us well. The last two weeks at Steve’s place were like a long ‘goodbye’ to my bohemian days. The poker crew, my warehouse friends and others, like Larry Davis, dropped by many mornings to enjoy Lindsey’s coffee, which she made with the grounds filtered through cold water. I’d never seen it done that way before but Larry loved it, or maybe it was just her. She had a naivety and cheerfulness to her which was not from Berkeley. She had a New Jersey accent and education, which elicited unexpected, often delightful replies to common questions from my friends. They all liked her and she was engulfed in a sea of compliments. I took her to the Plough many nights, a block away, for more of my friends to meet and admire, a two-way street for both parties.
It’s strange, but when you hook up with a girlfriend from out of your circle, (a total unknown), and fall in love with her and introduce her to your set, she inherits all of your friends in a matter of days, a whole new family of acquaintances, dear friends, which in my case was rich. On her side, I inherited no new friends, as she had none, except one, who was about to radically change my life, far more than any other person I ever met.
I didn’t know it at the time but I was even bidding ‘goodbye’ to the ‘Starry Plough’, as my visits, which had been three or four nights a week for the last two years would now become three or four times a year.
In this whirlwind of introductions and compliments and so many hugs and kisses between us, (for this is how Lindsey and I started out) it was a very pleasant two weeks. It was as if we about to embark on a long voyage together, arm in arm, to a foreign place, and many of my friends sensed this.
I hosted the last few poker games at Steve’s. Lindsey was the only other girl ever allowed to sit in on one, by common consent, an honor, if you consider how many hundreds took place without a female presence. Bones took over again and had the table moved to his place, (that well-traveled table) where I showed up infrequently now, as if being in the circumference of her arms put me a hundred miles distant from all my friends. Such is the enchanting distraction of love, from all the usual venues we know.
It’s been my contention in these journals that my core personality never changed. But I must admit it has been suddenly plucked from one arena and dropped into another, vastly different, and I like a gladiator, tested against a whole different range of beasts.
I seem to enjoy this variety (even the tests), moving from wild, daily parties to the sterility of a Niagara Falls then back to the continual ‘Mardi Gras’ of Berkeley for another two years, living it up to the maximum, and now finding, (or trying to find) an equally rich world in the embrace of a single woman and walking away, as I quickly agreed to move with her to where no one could find us. I seemed to delight in these radical shifts.
That land of enraptured love, so blind, like the land of the ‘Lotus Eaters’, I was only able to visit briefly, three or four times in my life, but long enough to taste it’s pleasures completely and fire my imagination, already heated, into a furnace of conjectures about women, how their minds worked, what made them tick, how they thought. This started in my late twenties and ended by forty, divorced, tired of the whole unintelligible matter. I didn't drop the question of the feminine mystique, but from then on I was free to consider it philosophically, no longer in bed with it.
