All of that time in hell to spend,Like all footloose perpetually single women, I’ve had my share of married men. When it first happened, it did not seem real; the married man was French living in another world, from a culture that looks upon this sort of dalliance with more tolerance than we do here in the United States but maybe that is a myth.
for kissing the married men.
---The Roches
I’ve always wondered why some proud Frenchwoman doesn’t bust the myth by writing a book about marriage, French-style, as they do with cooking and clothing. They could tell us how they too suffer over their husband’s affairs, how it is not taken for granted men have mistresses and that one-woman-one-man is just as sought after in Europe as it is here. Instead, we are called prudes by the French, naïve with our childish insistence on monogamy, told we should grow up instead of allowing careers to tank and families to dissolve over something that not new, not earth shattering. They do have a point.
When I was younger, I tended toward recklessness. I held nothing sacred regarding marriage. My parents were a disaster though I think they loved each other or had something that vaguely passed for it though its weave was of a flimsy cheap material.
I never thought of marriage, did not expect to ever enter such an alliance. The white wedding concept never once crossed my mind. It skipped a generation. None of my friends ever considered it either. It seemed a throwback to the fifties and conformity. I did not want children, another legacy from my mother who said it was a form of slavery. I had never been in love and I was now in my mid-thirties, still random, still brash.
I was working in a classical record store. The staff consisted of the sort you find in record stores in cities and university towns; dour, persnickety, critical with a healthy disdain for bad taste in music which consisted of anything that didn’t correspond with their own but as one of those types, I will say there is such a thing as good and bad taste in music. I won’t name names--you either know or you don't. So many people have bad taste now it can’t even be intellectually discussed and all I will do is offend. But in the days before CDs, there were standards in every category of music and you did not work in record stores if you didn’t understand that. We’ve gotten around that now by just not having record stores.
I was not specifically hired in the classical store for my immense knowledge of Mahler, Bruckner or Sibelius, I was neither a classical music aficionado or a jazz buff but a rocker, employed as eye candy in a store full of buzzards. I had worked with the manager, Dennis, in a regular record store and he knew that I; a) could talk to customers intelligently, b) was fun to have around, c) could keep the peace between the curmudgeons who thought they knew everything there is to know about classical music and were intent on domination, and d) would not offend tourists and other non-regular customers by insulting their preferences. “I need you to be on hand to schmooze when Philip Glass or the Kronos Quartet come for an in-store promotion. The guys won’t likely speak to them,” he said, contemporary and crossover being two words or should I say, categories, shunned in this rarefied setting. Leonard Bernstein was considered a hack though we certainly carried his records. Herbert Von Karajan was God.
I knew my place but I also knew my ear for music was as astute as theirs and I held my own in that regard. Eventually I could dissect Beethoven as easily as I had the Rolling Stones and in fact found the two to have similarities in structure. I can’t tell you how condescendingly this statement was received; I was ridiculed, snorted at or ignored. Dennis, who loved the Stones, told me I had a point but that the others had never listened to the Stones and found the idea blasphemous. He then presented me with a small collection of fifty classical recordings I should listen to and own, a gift, he said for not being argumentative or petty, having a sense of humor and an appreciation for what is sublime and beautiful. Quite a poignant speech he gave--memorable. Eventually I knew them all by heart.
You are probably thinking I’ve gone terribly off-track here with my story. I started talking about married men and have moved on to Beethoven and a record store long gone. It is in this background my story begins and I’ve always wanted to use a record store for a setting in a story. They are/were a place to find your groove, your soul, definitely your cool. A place to hang out in and forget your troubles.
I did not meet him in the record store, my married man. I’d better give him a name I suppose--let’s call him Jack, I’ve always liked that name and I’m Jill so what could be more compatible? I met him in the newsroom of the daily paper for which I contributed record, concert and book reviews. He was on staff but just barely. He was looking for a way out with an early retirement and could hardly stand the place--the politics, the conformity, the new corporate mentality, the non-smoking policy. He was nostalgic for the days when a newsroom was filled with smoke, profane yelling, clackety typewriters and a bottle of booze in every desk, freely passed around after deadline. Computers and solemnity gave him the creeps, he said.
I was sent into his department to line up a photographer for the Andre Watts concert set for the coming weekend. I was submitting a preview piece I’d written although my boss in the record store would officially review it. We were to use a professional photographer in honor of Mr. Watts’s stature and not snap our own pictures as I might at a Modern Lovers show.
Jack, a disgruntled pile of chain-smoking misery, having recently been in an accident and for the above mentioned reasons, came upon me while exiting the photo lab. He glared, cited his obvious displeasure at the invasion and stalked away. I followed him but before introducing myself and my purpose for the intrusion I smiled and cracked a joke hoping he would not bite my head off, such volatility did his mood suggest. I can honestly say it was love at first sight for me. Maybe it was the leather jacket in a professional environment, maybe it was the rebel stance, maybe his intense stare or his nervous energy. Whatever it was, it worked for me.
I was surprised to see him at the Watts concert taking the pictures. He hadn’t said anything the day we met. I went over to where he was shooting, giving up my own great seat to hang out with him. Afterward we went for coffee--he didn’t drink, was a recovering alcoholic, sober for going on five years. He gulped copious cups of coffee and hacked at a piece of key lime pie.
On Monday he came into the record store and invited me for lunch. We took a rather long lunch and meandered in and out of bookstores and galleries sort of talking, mostly joking, using humor to guard against life’s assaults. We had that in common. Unlike my coworkers, he held no hard and fast opinions and was easy to be with. He said AA takes all that arrogance out of you. He grabbed me and kissed me in an alcove in a used book store. I was surprised and my heart lurched despite a feeling of awkwardness at the approach and the place. But I was smitten. That night we talked on the phone for two hours, as we did every night for the next week. We met for lunch each day even if it was only a sandwich in his car in front of the record store. He invited me to have dinner on Friday night and since I had free tickets to hear a string quartet, I can’t remember which one exactly, we would show up late and make media noises. It doesn’t get any better than this, I thought. To fall in love finally and with someone with an appreciation for classical music as I did, more each day.
I was enthusiastically telling my friend Catherine all about him, how I’d met someone I could love; someone above the usual winsome crushes and one-night stands, someone for real. I told her I could see a future. She and I had recently discussed how I live day to day and never try to visualize the future the way most people do. We talked about whether it was a blessing or a hindrance. We hadn’t decided. I don’t know how or why she said what she said but it hit me like a gust of frigid air: "Are you sure he’s not married, Jill?"
Why did she say it? It never crossed my mind. It was not even the sort of thing she and I ever talked about, it didn’t come up in conversations about the opposite sex. My reaction was, "Why no, I don’t think so, wouldn’t he have mentioned it in a two hour phone conversation?" My voice warbled a bit.
"I don’t know," she said, "but I’d find out fast if I were you." I think that is what is known as a putting a damper on something--I felt damp and cold. It also never occurred to me someone would purposely obscure such a salient point. When he called an hour later, I listened to him for awhile, his voice so happy, so carefree, exuding affection. He sounded like a child on Christmas morning. I then jumped in where I did not want to go and said, “You aren’t by any chance married, are you?”
Dead silence. And I mean dead as in, I just killed one or the other of us. I hadn’t really thought he was married but Catherine’s intuition wasn’t something to ignore--she was famous for it. I felt something akin to being struck by lightening. At first a jolt to the solar plexus, then a numb, stung trance. He moaned a sickly groan and finally uttered in a voice buried somewhere beneath the universe, “What has that to do with going to a concert?”
There it was. Hope so dashed I couldn’t respond. I lay on the bed wishing for the numbness to subside so I could experience the true and primitive pain. More silence. Then the stupefaction abated and resentment flooded me. I said, “Well that depends on whether or not your wife knows we are going to the concert and having dinner before it.” Another pained silence. “So, you see,” I said, “we can’t go based on that...” He didn’t try to cajole or excuse himself and hanging up, I could feel his dejection from miles away.
It’s funny that today, so many years after that telephone conversation, I can remember it with startling accuracy to the point of having to stop typing because of the agitation its regurgitation caused. That first disappointment so sharp it took my breathe away and made my head reel. I got up off the floor and sat in my one chair looking out the window unable to move until well after midnight. In Henry James’s novel, The Portrait of a Lady, when Isabel learns the truth about her husband and Madame Merle she sits up all night, the candles long burned out and still she remains in a chair unable to go to bed. That is how I felt that night; unable to take the next step.
What had led Catherine to suspect this detail? She did not know him or anything of him. I could only admire her instincts, obviously I had none. Nevertheless, I blamed her for my unhappiness as if she had something to do with it and our friendship was never the same after. She called the next day to apologize and said her coworker had been dating a man unaware of his marital status and she was now a complete wreck and had to take time off work. "I just had that in my mind, Jill, sorry, I didn’t mean to put it on you. I'm just peeved at having to do her job as well as my own." I sulked silently and admitted to nothing.
I could end the story here, say how long it took me to bounce back, thankful to my friend who helped me dodge a bullet. That would make a nice morally edifying story, I could tell you how Brahms First Symphony got me through my woebegone days. How the Goldberg Variations soothed my ruptured soul and that would be true but I think you can probably guess it didn’t end there. We were both in the grip of something to let it end on a clean, clear note.
We began an affair that lasted for a year on active status, then relegated to the margins of our life after it became insufferable. We fell hard, we fell fast and neither of us wanted to pull away. At first I assumed he would divorce, in fact he made so many plans for our future I didn’t question him on this. I let him fantasize and project a life for us. But after the first few months I did not really project myself into the future he envisioned; somehow I knew it was a flight of the imagination and I was often despondent as the months wore on.
He said I brought him into the light, that as a recovering alcoholic, AA propped him up but he still lived in the dark, the mindset that led to his excessive drinking still intact. “Now that's over,” he said. “I no longer live in the shadow.”
Unfortunately, the same could not be said for me. I was now inexorably a resident of the shadowy side of the street. Catherine dumped me for not heeding her warning and brooding excessively, the paper fired me with a corporate takeover that saw no need for book and record reviews that could be taken from the wire service. They also fired Jack, or approved the settlement he’d been trying to get and he went on disability. I lost my charming studio apartment and my ability to laugh at my coworkers.
I’d like to interject a few thoughts at this point: Like all love affairs, it started off on a splendid tenor, of exuberant light and high notes. We never spent the night together, we never went on furtive trips out of town or shacked up in motels. There was no element of sleaze or tawdry doings. Usually we had lunch. He would arrive at my place around eleven in the morning and I would have prepared a lunch for us rather like an afternoon tea. We had light sandwiches, a cake, maybe some salad, some cheese, several pots of coffee or tea, maybe some fruit. Sometimes we would go out for lunch to a diner or a delicatessen and eat hefty sandwiches and drink a lot of coffee. After lunch we would read poetry, look at books on art, talk softly, or just take a nap happy to lie on the small bed together. At around four he would get ready to leave and these late afternoon departures became sadder as the months wore on. Sometimes we would drive to some rural spot and take nature photos. Once we went fishing and I caught a gargantuan brook trout, my one and only foray into this pastime. Ours was a fairly innocent affair but that is what made it so deadly for me. We were living the life I envisioned for us but despite its charm, because of its charm, there was hell to pay.
During that time, I discovered a movie called Indiscreet, with Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, a love story. They too fall hard and fast and before either can catch their breath, he tells her he is married. I studied her reaction to this news because I had so recently taken that particular sock in the gut and so fully identified with her I had to watch the movie several times. If you know this movie, you know that Cary Grant has only told her he’s married because women keep trying to reel him in and he prefers the bachelor life, the "harmless" fib his line of defense. In true Hollywood fashion, that is, fantasy, he falls for her and decides to let her know with a surprise marriage proposal. Meanwhile, she learns he has been lying to her all along and she’s mighty upset but I knew she must have been ready to weep for joy after the initial shock. All I could think was, How I wish someone would tell me that it was all a huge joke, ha, ha. The movie became more irritating to me the more I watched it and today I can’t watch it at all. I too received bunches of roses but I could not let myself entertain fantasies or happily-ever-after scenarios. I was in deep trouble and could only hope to survive it.
As we blithely carried on our liaison, I realized he could not divorce. He had four children, three grown but a young daughter still at home and I could not reconcile that in my mind. I could be the “other” woman but home-wrecker was not a picture I had of myself. After about nine months one of us cried pretty much every time we were together. Eventually we just sat holding hands waiting for the courage to part.
On my birthday, lunch in my apartment, home of all our happy hours, after opening my presents--he gave me an expensive camera among others things--we ate our cake, drank two pots of coffee and I ended it. We took some pictures of ourselves and tried to be as lighthearted as possible as he got ready to leave. He pretended I was hurting him but I knew he was relieved. My chest pounded and I could feel my hands breaking out in eczema, my sadness disease. At two in the afternoon he left and I sat in my chair not listening to Brahms or Chopin or Grieg but just the deathly quiet of a Sunday afternoon.
At this time, another relationship came to a head. Or should I say relationships. I did something in the classical store that was beyond forgiveness: I confessed to not only loving Glenn Gould more than any other pianist but had the nerve to write a colossally affected review of a recently released box-set collection. For some reason, and I have never figured it out, it was the unanimous opinion of my coworkers that Glenn Gould was a pretentious poseur whose playing of Bach was so far from the composer’s ideal that it was not to be borne, indeed, was not even to be given the stature of amiable discourse. It was not just a matter of the differences between say, Richter’s playing versus Lipatti’s, Ashkenazy’s versus Brendel’s. No, Gould could not even be compared. When his name came up, avoidance was the preferred response though we carried his records. None of this I understood. The guy was a prodigy, revered world wide. After the review appeared in the paper, my days were numbered at the record store. One of my coworkers with whom I remained friends tried to console me by saying this: “It’s just an emotional woman thing that stems from not really understanding classical music.” I wondered how long he’d been waiting to lob that at me. He went on to say I shouldn’t have submitted the review because “it embarrassed the store.” Dennis never forgave me for not running it by him first. He said it was fatuous gushing. Like Gould, I was now persona non grata.
The Glenn Gould affair, as I referred to it, was a minor matter compared to my other entanglement. I have had love affairs since but I never really recovered from this one. Catherine’s question and Jack’s answer were like a drill that hacked up a piece of my heart and left holes. I can still feel them if I try. I cried for about a year, had to move in with my mother, thought of suicide but I suppose I resurrected myself in time.
You may wonder why I ended it. (Or maybe you wouldn’t.) It was at one of our luncheons, Jack was talking about his wife, which he would now do more often. In the past he wouldn’t or when he did it was with a biting scorn. I noticed the old anger toward her was gone. He nattered on about her as if she were his new friend. (She was.) With this observation, I knew it was over for us. Meanwhile, he kept telling me I had brought him in from the gloom and he was now a more sane person as he’d never been before. “There was always something lurking inside me, waiting to destroy me and my relationships. You’ve made it go away,” he said and hugged me, pulling me close.
I wish I could say I’m proud of my ability to heal but since it had not served any useful purpose for myself, I was unmoved by this pronouncement. On clearer days, I could genuinely say I wanted happiness for him despite my own lack of it, felt he had a bigger capacity for it than I.
After one month to the day of my birthday and our breakup, I broke down and called him. I felt like a page from an old newspaper that had been put through a shredder. His voice on the phone sounded like death--gray, pale, far removed from active life. I rasped into the phone, “Jack, I’m dying here,” and its desperation matched his perfectly. “I’ll be right over,” he rasped back.
Like our first meeting, I can hear his voice saying that perfectly today. He arrived and fell on my sofa-bed like he had crawled the twenty miles from his house. We didn’t say anything that day, just lay there trying to regain living form in each others' presence. After twenty minutes he said, “I can breathe again.” I didn’t answer--it hurt too much. We didn’t have lunch that day or do anything at all. We said only a handful of words. After two hours he got up and we walked to the door. He left and I resumed life in a fetal position in the duskiness of my room.
I blew town shortly after unable to be around anything that was a reminder--stores, restaurants, sidewalks, entire parts of the city, the newspaper. I seemed to have lost everything anyway. I went somewhere awful and took a terrible job as if punishing myself--not for the affair, but for losing out--not being worthy of something precious.
If I were interested in continuing this dramatic tale, and yes, I know it is presented as quite a sob-story and for those of you who disparage this sort of maudlin muck, forgive me, you would not find this melodrama in my repertoire today--I do not fall so easily. But if I were interested in a compelling drama I might end this story by saying Jack went back to drinking, his marriage fell apart, he hit bottom and begged me to take him back into my little cloistered world but that would not be truthful although I might like to try that ending on for size.
In fact, he joined a church with his wife and daughter, went on goodwill missions, took in a foster child, built homes for Habitat for Humanity and quit smoking. He is and always had been a good man. We still meet a couple times a year for coffee and sandwiches, friends ‘til the end. I remained single and adrift, had other men, various degrees of attraction but I’ve never loved again and I expect I never shall. That final wordless day took the idyllic option from my table.
I recently looked in a file of old clips and read the Glenn Gould record review that caused such a stir. It was as emotional as the pianist himself and more than a little overwrought. Gould loved a married woman, detested the world of classical music performance, retired in his thirties, lived as a hermit in Canada and died at fifty. I still wonder why he was so maligned by my coworkers. He played the piano like nobody’s business. Even Von Karajan admired him.
As a wise and worldly Frenchwoman I recently met said, “These things happen, they are a part of life, they are your truth. You have to celebrate when life gives you someone to love and cope when things fall apart.” Maybe we should write a book.
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