Black Lamb

With alacrity

April 1st, 2007

BY LORENTZ LOSSIUS

I snap out of it on the last hundred yards, from the figure-eight path looping through Carlton Gardens onto the busy road I must cross to get home. I cannot remember running the last gasping half-mile stretch. It’s a complete blank. Five minutes lost. Well, I must have done it, mustn’t I? Up there then, down here now, five minutes of lost time, an alien vacuum. Then I remember why I lost the time. I’d been pounding through a poignant recollection of friendship destroyed, a momentary bitterness over my ex-wife, over a brief, naïve experience of marriage. I suppose I needed to push even those thoughts aside for the last few blank seconds, as there’s always been a twinge of guilt involved in the thinking.

I will disguise details of name and face, out of respect for the privacy of a woman I lost touch with and who cannot speak for herself in this forum (she is a poet, though, and probably has elsewhere, in her feisty, filigreed way). I mustn’t pretend to be so high-minded, either. The need to be coy arises out of prudence, too. Why compromise a nearly lifeless but faintly fluttering desire to return to the United States to live, some day.

I met my one and only wife, as I’ve hinted in a previous piece, at a party in New York City in 1989. She was sitting on a cushion in the corner, alert and silent on the far side of a crowing throng of New York art and theatre types. I was immediately drawn to her deep fall of brown hair, her unpainted, freckle-tanned face, the quietness surrounding her corner of the room, and went over to chat. She was a poet, divorced, part native-American, too, she mentioned. And I was a wanderer, dreamed of writing, and a homo, a fact I revealed to create a safe zone for us both. We had a long lunch next day, with her almost-adult son in tow. A couple of years later, Sara told me she’d phoned her daughter in a giddy rush that morning, crying, “I’m having lunch with a handsome young Norwegian-Australian writer. Should I go?”

Sara, who was from old New England stock and had married very well in France, had thrown off those privileged bonds, left her life in Europe, Morocco, and the East Coast, and gone to live in the Southern California desert on the Mexican border east of San Diego, west of Calexico. She lived with Todd, a Vietnam vet, in her trailer on a rocky stretch of land they’d been caretaking for a few years. She invited me to stay with them if I ever needed to get out of the city. A few months later, I went.

My ’89 journal expresses it well.

July 25: Chaparral, boulder-strewn badlands, rocky outcrops with yucca, cholla cactus, saltbush, buckwheat, and manzanita bushes. Todd and Sara have a large trailer hidden behind some boulders. Peach blood sunset, hills and buttes silhouetted against it, at one point in the evening various layers of ridges can be seen, one behind the other in weakening shades of grey. A few lights in the distance, and silence. Sleeping on the outside bed, a mattress wedged between some rocks a couple of hundred yards down the slope. Coyotes squealing in the night, and the biggest array of stars I’ve seen. Several shooting stars, and by 3 am an intensely bright quarter moon.

July 27: A hot day, sawing up boards to line the generator pit. Now the generator is secure and dry but still overheats down there, too small a space. There’s a problem with the gas refrigerator in the trailer. The wind is too strong to put up a shade cloth. Spend the afternoon sitting naked in a chair reading Burroughs’ The Western Lands. Thunder clouds to the west. I send out a wish for rain. Later, around 5 pm, sitting with Sara in the trailer, reading poetry aloud to her as she stirs the chilli. A drop or two stings my foot through the open door. Then it hits with a bang. We race outside laughing and disbelieving. Heavy rain, first from the East, then from the West, then the North, then a diagonal weave of splashy rain and hail from the South crossing swords with a fine rain from the North. A spectacular evening of color, a brilliant sunset, thunder, wind and lightning. Quiet by 11 pm. We drink Mormon tea and cannot sleep.

Aug 7: Sara’s poems are rich with the desert and her moods, impressionistic tints of mauve, melancholy green, and orange. We talk. I tell her something is missing for me, a backbone within the text to knit it all together and give it power. Maybe I think too much like a male. Sara doesn’t mind. She asks what I think about making music. Well, it’s what I know and love. It’s in my blood. She asks me why I write words. I have no idea why. She says, a bit mysteriously, that this is significant.

Aug 9: Supper of burritos and tequila, sitting on a large rock with Todd and Sara and the kittens, a towering sky lit by the sunset underneath, copper, mauve and grey. A huge black and russet-haired tarantula creeps up onto the rock looking for a water pool. It rears and freezes as the kitten teases it. We shoo the kitten away and admire the spider as it sidles over the rock under the flashlight’s beam.

* * *

On her next brief visit to New York Sara offered to marry me. I’d been working odd jobs on my tourist visa, had returned once to the UK to renew it, and it looked as though my time in the U.S. would have to end before long. She made the offer as a gesture of friendship enabling me to stay. I agreed after a few more months of phone calls, but worried over it incessantly. I spent the following summer at her desert camp. Arizona would be the easiest and quickest legal option. We agreed to go to Yuma on August first.

The night before, Sara, Todd and I had a long talk until late. I still had doubts about marrying a friend, about staying in the U.S. Maybe this was just another quixotic quest? Sara’s reply: “You’ve started something in this country, you should see it through.” Todd assured me they had no interest in relying on me financially. So to bed, tired, feeling self-protective, but resolved to enjoy tomorrow.

Next day was very hot. Sara and I drove to Yuma across the Imperial Valley mesa and sand dune desert. We lunched on shrimp and hush puppies, beer and wine, and went to the county courthouse marriage bureau to get a license. The JP’s office was closed, but we found Lute’s Gretna Green Wedding Chapel, a tiny place tucked in behind a large house, and waited. An Irish Baptist minister, around sixty years of age with a vast girth, plied us with a mirthful patter of marital advice, along with biblical and anti-Catholic bromides, before pronouncing us husband and wife. We were both relieved to get it over with, and drove out of Yuma’s enormous expanse of bungalows, vacant lots, motels, and fast food restaurants by the Colorado River, back across the valley, humid and hazy, or maybe covered by a dust bowl. As we rose out of it we could see its edge drifting up from the Baja California gulf. The sun low, the colors of the rocky hills pink then green, we got back to the top by suppertime. The three of us ate spaghetti, Todd and Sara went to their bed in the trailer, and I to my mattress on the rocks beneath the stars and early morning dew.

Three months later I flew out for our final INS interview in San Diego. I’d been in a slow-burning panic the whole time. Our union seemed implausibly poetic. Sara was much older than me. I’d surely be deported and she’d be in trouble. But it went smoothly. There was a big crowd in the waiting room, everyone patient and slightly sad. It looked like we were the only non-Mexicans. Our interview was brief, and we weren’t separated for the dreaded interrogation concerning the color of toothbrushes or customary sexual positions. Sara had a nervous, asthmatic moment and thought she’d left her inhaler in the car. I was a tower of tender husbandly concern. Our interviewer asked us why we were together. “We’re both writers,” said Sara. “OH MY, I’ve always wanted to write a romance novel. I was talking about that with my girlfriend who works border patrol just last week!” She stamped my passport and ushered us out beaming. We were in shock for days.

* * *

A year later I moved from New York to Seattle and found work with a landscaping outfit, bank account near zero again. In our marriage discussions Sara and I hadn’t talked specific sums of money. She did not want such things from me. This was an agreement between friends, and I undertook to pay all expenses incurred by our liaison, and added, that when I could I’d send a further thousand bucks every year we were married. It wasn’t that much of a deal, it was fair, and I’d been prompt so far. But in late ’92 I had no spare cash, and needed a couple more months.

I suppose the full import of what she’d done had hit Sara. I knew she’d been married three times before, but I didn’t have the experience to imagine how that might have affected her, or us. The tone of our communication began to change. Emotions rose. It hadn’t occurred to me that passion might be involved. Did we not know each other after all? Her money worries increased. Todd was difficult, and a drain. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might be really relied upon. I began to see that in her desire for freedom, Sara was caught in another trap a long time in the making. She had no assets apart from the trailer, a wagon, some jewellery in a bank vault back East, and no money but a monthly allowance from a trust fund and donations from her old New York friends whom she visited every year. It’s not the sort of thing a friend wants to think about, but as a spouse I had to. The friends were less generous now that she had “a husband,” and the monthly allowance had gone down a notch or two. She might have to sell the gold torque in the vault. It was all she had left of her former life.

Sometime later, on a collect call from the phone box in Jacumba, Sara raged, “I am not some little wifey,” and then, “and I’m not after your father’s money,” before bursting into tears and slamming down the phone. “What ‘father’s money’?” I spluttered, unheard. I felt guilty at not coming through with prompt financial support like a man should, uneasy at the direction things were taking, and a bit pissed off.

I shot back a note, including the following:

In the desert sits “wifey”, her pants-all-hot
Still looking at all men askance-a-lot
Writing pages of moping
Poetic rage, hoping
That Larry will yet be her Lancelot

I got a message in the mail two weeks later, a half-sheet of graph paper with a strange, careful, square kind of script on it. It was a dry, anonymous, prosaic little note. “You will send me one thousand dollars by the due date or Immigration will be contacted.” I promptly borrowed from an Australian uncle. Afraid things were going to escalate along these lines; I got a King County divorce as soon as the necessary three years were up, no contest offered. I was grateful for my green card, but felt like a total shit as well.

The next note I received, in a script recognizable as hers, was still dry, with an amused bite to it: “I see you’ve divorced me with alacrity!”

I visited the border region a couple of times in ’93. We were both subdued but mellow. Todd wasn’t around when I’d call in. A few months later I wended my way from Seattle back to New York. Sara eventually moved, too. She and Todd were living in a tepee. She had a phone number and a post box in New Mexico. I wrote and called a couple of times. I still had no money saved, and when her car repair expenses came up itemized, or Todd’s unreliability, or the dwindling away of the monthly portion of her trust fund, I felt tense and bad about changing the subject. “Is your son working? How is your daughter? And all your (wealthy and successful) friends in New York?” I’d ask.

We lost touch, but I thought of her often and wished we’d worked things through. By the late Nineties I’d got in on the desktop publishing trade down on Wall Street, was cashed up for the first time in my life, tried to get in touch again through the friends and relatives I knew of, but the doors stayed shut.

What can one learn from this? Does honest disclosure between platonic friends, all high-minded and reasonable, serve to hide expectations and feelings that await their day in court? Should extra sacrifice have overridden my fears?

I’ve missed our friendship a great deal. For me it had been a brotherly-sisterly trust. In our conversations over poetry and life, our muses complemented one another well. I missed our desert evening walks, of soaring observations and companionable quiet. I missed her moments of effusive lunescence. A friendship that could have been long and great was spoiled by the undertow of a marriage, the weight of roles, obligations and resentments, shaken up from the slumbering depths of convention by an act of legal union. •

Posted by: The Editors
Category: Lossius, All Marriage Issue | Link to this Entry