1983 was a very bad year? Jan. 2, 1986
As I pointed out yesterday, I should have been warned by the
car crash with Fran, and Pauly’s two gig band disaster.
I felt crowded by Fran in the early months, trapped in a system
of work and romance that didn’t seem to leave much room for writing.
This may be because I had so much time before, to run, to
write, to be lonely.
Only recently have I learned that this is a typical male
reaction to personal relationships.
I was also struggling with a story called “Corn Meal,”
during which I described making love of Louise (changing the names to protect
the innocent only to have Fran see right through the façade and felt threatened
by an event that took place more than a decade earlier.
I recall my first spat with Fran at the Passaic Park
Friendly’s when some of our differences became very clear.
She had a way of living she refused to allow me to disturb
as did I, shaping the landscape later for many of our problems.
She eventually changed, but not in a good way.
Yet for the first few months of our time together, it was
like a honeymoon, a time when serious problems seemed remote (yet with enough foreshadowing
to suggest they would crop up later with a vengeance as I began to feel repressed
without freedom to act out my own life.
After breaking up with Suzanne a few years ago, I heard a
report about how men who have been on their own for five years after a divorce
or breakup, tend to stay that way. They get set in their ways.
I guess I felt that way even during the best times with
Fran. But her trip to Texas broke the camel’s back. I was saddled with new responsibilities
I didn’t want, inherited a dog my neighbor abandoned when he moved out (forcing
me to lose time and energy through routines such as walking the dog three times
a day).
While she was off on her road trip, I found out Graystone
intended to release my uncle again, which meant there would be no room for me,
him and Fran in the two room apartment I occupied at the time, forcing me to
move into the larger apartment so my uncle could take up the smaller one – this
on the assumption Fran would move in with me when she got back.
More importantly, Fran didn’t keep in contact while she was
gone, leaving me to guess what she intended, and still making me feel as if she
abandoned me, a feeling that got substantiated when she finally returned and
refused to move in, saddling me instead with her brother, who she’d brought back
with her and who needed a place to stay temporarily, with the idea he would
move to Vermont within a month or so.
The intimacy that had made my relationship with Fran worth
the loss of time vanished, too.
After Texas, everything was tense. I had gotten used to
freedom again and could no longer put myself in the box I’d lived her prior to
her going.
Fran wanted to return to the not-so-simple relationship she
had enjoyed prior as well, seeing me, seeing her former boyfriend, going back
and forth when I wanted to be exclusive.
Things got worse. I found two kittens in the yard. And then
Pauly needed a place to live, and I agreed to let him have one of the rooms of
the larger apartment in exchange for splitting the rent.
Fran caught ring worm and blamed it on one of the two kittens,
and came to see me less and less, using this or some other excuse.
Then, after she got put out of the place she was living, she
decided she wanted to move in with me after all, only I had already agreed to
let Pauly live with me, and she got very angry when I said I could not go back
on my word with him.
She eventually moved in with her other lover, at which point,
we stopped seeing each other.
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