My last gasp.

Moving in and moving out.

As for Sanita and I, on that island of love and fornication, I can only say our sex life took the exact opposite course, the end of the affair. Each time we moved into a new and strange house, far away and far different from the last, something perked up a bit in Sanita’s imagination, like a light in a lantern, and we’d have good sex for a week or two or three.

That was one of the few pleasures I received in payment for all the troubles and expenses of moving so often. It happened here too, for the last time. She loved our little loft and the small, coziness of it, the mattress on the wood, the ceiling only a foot high at our feet and four feet high at our pillows. We could barely sit up and had to snuggle into bed like worms. And she felt sympathy for the serious accident I suffered two months earlier. All I can say here is that her flame quickly faded after a week. The lantern went dim, then out, forever.

After the first month in our new cabin it ended. It was the night before I was leaving for St. Croix to work, and two weeks before she mentioned the ‘D’ word. But that was already settled in her secretive mind. I thought I deserved something before my month’s absence, as I was going to St. Croix, a place I hated, just to support us. But she pushed me away roughly and said: ‘Never again’.

Even this didn’t clue me in as to what was coming. I figured women were fickle and changed their minds frequently. I can sum myself up briefly: in understanding women, I was blind. I didn’t try. My mind and interests were in better places, distant, doting on dead or imaginary people, noble souls, not the whining, fretful, petty, demanding personas most women adopt, with not a clue in the world as to what they want out of life.

I still enjoy all the sublime pleasures of imagination that literature offers. I don’t have a wife or the sex I might enjoy with one, or the company. But at my age, that’s the better bargain, if they are mutually exclusive. And in a way they are. The commonplace attentions I would have fawned upon her as a doting husband might have prolonged our first love and enriched our lives as equals, over decades. But that attention would have come at a price.

As two fools we could easily have squabbled and fallen out over any minor issue, unable to see things in perspective. Now I’m comparing intelligence against good sex and plain, simple, common company. Which do I chose? A warm bed and body next to me or a re-read of ‘Crime and Punishment’ all alone? Dostoyevsky always wins. As I said before, some few, lucky people live a thousand rich lives, most others a single, stupid, miserable one, as she does now, and for the last twenty years. Even her sister won't talk to her. Only her all-forgiving mother.

Now that our love life was over, a brief recap of her personality and her changing views of me and my friends is in order. Her altered feelings over those years I can only guess at, as shrouded in mystery to me as the dark workings of her mind.

In the beginning (the first year) we were deeply in love. She tried to like what I liked, she did speed with me and when someone offered it, coke. She indulged dozens of times with me alone or along with my friends whom she grew to like, especially Bruno and Claire, Jim H., Marge and Steve. She put up with John Seeback, seeing how much I esteemed him, but little more because he was often dirty and foul smelling, and she never understood our long and intense conversations, so deep and abstruse and filled with complicated ideas and strange quotes that hardly anyone could follow our flights. For the same reason, at first, she stood aloof from Bill (until he visited us in Santa Cruz and charmed her). The same with Hiram. He slowly grew on her there, staying with us. But never Chuck. He was impossible to like.

Bones and May she only met a few times. They were mostly out of the picture by then. She might have formed some friendship with May but I doubt it. They were same-sex opposites. Bones would have been polite in conversation, full of goodwill and wishes for the both of us and played us a few songs, or many if we were doing lines. He would have liked her for her simplicity and beauty.

Robin and Louie she liked, but they rarely came by. She befriended Norma and Amaris and became friends with Consuelo and a year later, Dale. They had enough in common to form bonds, which their talks, smoothly reciprocal, solidified.

She distrusted her own impressions of anyone whom she wasn’t on a par with, whom she deemed smarter than her, especially men, suspicious of their kind attentions to her, imagining darker motives behind their words, as any unexpected gift one receives and thinks they don’t deserve. That’s why it took her time to warm up to my intellectual friends, though some gained her trust sooner than others. Personality plays a large part in this, in mysterious ways.

So now comes the hard question: How could she possibly fall in love with me, when we were obviously so different?

First was the fact that I was instrumental in rescuing her from dire straights. On that week-long trip I showed her all my attention and gave her clues of a deeper affection forming, pushing Joel out of the picture with a few cold remarks, another sign that I wanted to win her love. Then my gifts to her and picking up the tabs and hints that I had lots of money. But it was all too easy as she showed equal signs of being attracted to me from day one, with looks and smiles. That first picture with her hand on my thigh tells all. On New Year’s Eve we sealed the deal.

In our first year together she tried to read some of the books I recommended, but she was never much of a reader and didn’t have the background to enjoy my favorites. Only some pages of Amiel’s journals and Hemingway did she enjoy, and some poems I read to her.

I remember one night in Paris, after a bought a cheap paperback of Hemingway’s short stories, after she had dipped into a few pages, I was reading the book in bed beside her and after a half hour, she told me it was her turn to read it. I didn’t want to give it up and came up with the perfect solution. I ripped the book in half, giving her a share. That was our love in those first months, everything so simple and fair and as mutually enjoyed as our bodies. At that time she enjoyed drugs as much as I did and had for years before I met her. When she slowly left off doing them before her pregnancy, our two vessels drifted apart.

But by the time I wrote my novel ‘The Whitening’, five years later, she only read half through it, giving it a few hours in bed over a few mornings, mentioning some passages she liked, after I’d spent ten months composing it, almost in front of her.

Sex with Sanita was great the first year. The first time in Mexico she had loud orgasms. But after that it was a few moans, subdued ones. She was eager for sex at first, especially after long, intimate talks in bed late at night, high on speed, under those silk sheets at Norma’s. France was an exciting time also, many nights. But with her pregnancy things changed. I didn’t want to hurt her and never insisted or even asked, so very little happened. In Upper Lake we found our huge walk-in shower a pleasure for awhile, for a few weeks, till that novelty too wore off.

But on this topic the fault was half mine, half her’s. I was past my prime of ten years earlier, ignorant of foreplay, and with speed and alcohol in the mix, most nights just not interested. On her part I blame her total silence. She never told me what she liked or didn’t, when she wanted it or not, what turned her on or off, though I could see her growing coldness, as if that's what she wanted. Her hand was on the dial.

She told me nothing and never initiated it with a single hint or gesture, as if she was completely, sexually dead. I even thought this was the case sometimes. But then I’d reflect that she never told me anything about any of her feelings or wants or desires, her aspirations for anything in her life, except the few times she’d point to a new place on the map and said we had to move there, right away. But even then she never told me why.

After Upper Lake we quit holding hands when walking together. Hugs became rare, kisses a rarity, in front of relatives at birthdays or Christmas. Once or twice a year I brought home a gift for her. In this department I blame myself. I was remiss in showing that kind of affection. But I was always polite and civil in addressing her, and honoring her every wish and giving her more attention if she asked. For her, to ask was to receive.

The irony to me was that there were millions of women who would have cherished me as a great husband and then supported me in my own ambitions at which I would have prospered, with their help, financially. She never tried at all. Marjorie in St. Croix mentioned this to me, offered it to me. Yet I staid devoted to Sanita, with long ago chivalry.

Marjory's veranda, the only place one could talk literature on St. Croix

We still had sex a few times a month but she would often just lay there, motionless and expressionless. I made it quick and we then rolled in opposite directions and went to sleep. I suppose she considered this some sort of minimal duty owed to me for supporting her in pure leisure and moderate luxury for so many years. If I weren’t a moral being, devoted to her on a far higher ideal of love, if I were some base, stupid Cro-Magnon, like most brutes hungry for frequent sex (which I never needed, and which explains our long relationship), I’d have ditched her within a few months.

I’d have fed my base lusts from an ocean of sleazy women picked up in some cheap bar district in San Francisco, boasting big words, claiming I was a published author and then flashing a fat wad of hundreds, peeling one off as I bought her another drink, sealing the deal. But I wasn’t that lech, or anything near it, as that would entail drugs and degradation along with the guilt, the dirty sheets, the lies, the wasted, sordid life, sliding ever further into a derelict old age.

The French say “Vive la différence”. In that phrase I probably see more than was ever meant. My attraction to a woman is amplified not just by physical charms, but by every characteristic in which she is different from me. I love the most feminine voice, which a southern accent only amplifies. I’m moved by a women’s skinny arms, her weaknesses, frailties. I’d love to take her by the arm and help her up a staircase.

That’s why high heels and tight clothes are so enticing. The shoes make her wobble with each step she takes, about to fall, and the tight dress, besides revealing her curves, confines her movement. She’s in no attire to run away or escape. I want to escort her across the street, guide her safely home, like a gentleman. It enhances my own self-esteem.

I find the same entrancing allure in a woman’s mind, the way it thinks differently, with a fascinatingly odd set of priorities. The more feminine they are makes them all the more a seductive being to me because it opens up whole new venues and perspectives, which I never dreamt, making me all the richer for seeing how the other half of humanity thinks. Then I could show her my priorities, what moves me most, passages in books. I think the essence of love is wanting to share, on the deepest levels, just as sex is the most intimate form of touching.

I fell in love with her as she met all these ideals, her beauty, her femininity, even her fragility. But I found over time that she didn’t share her mind with me. I wish we could have talked for days on end and she inspire and guide me down the path to becoming the romantic lover I wanted to be for her. But she was a closed book and I was never one to pry. So I went back to reading “The Fairie Queene” and a hundred other books, ignoring her cold indifference. I wrote her poems she never saw.

Our happiest period was our three months in Paris because that was a romantic escape we could share and talk about, in delight and wonderment. I was a hopeless romantic, not of this age, and increasingly, not for her. At least we conceived Willy there.

And to this day, I have to thank her for that gift.

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