MARLENE

ON MARLENE

As I look back at memorable summers in Woodstock I had no idea that they were to be so impactful as to obtain the status of emblematic experiences. I was purely experiencing people and place, not observing, which is the more reflective stance to assume. Nearing my end as it is the autumn of my life, I can take a better measure of who I was and who I am at this moment. It is the gift of old age, if you avail yourself of it. The separating and divorcing of my wife was manumission, but a slave needs a lifetime, if not longer, to be fully emancipated. While I was liberated legally, I was emotionally “enslaved” to an adulterous affair. I lived a very dim awareness, particularly of myself, an empty vessel. Without knowing it, or sensing it, I moved from one kind of slavery to another. I call this being an unaware fool.

From the summer of 1968 in which I pined for Marlene and experienced depression through the next school year when we split up in December, the summer of 69 proved to be one of mourning and melancholia. Since I had no network of friends to share my misfortune (a continuing theme in my life), I only had a malignant therapist to guide me through it all – and, of course, my randy friend Hal.

All the story cannot be told because of its lacunae: missing responses on Marlene’s part, inhibitions on my part, fumbled communication or the lack of it on both our parts; repressed feelings lest we break up, impulsive actions for the joy in that. Reason, what there was of it, weakly served as the bow – not the stern – and an aimless rudder of my being at that wild and wooly time. When asked by her attorney why she wanted a divorce at this time, Marlene told him all she wanted was a divorce from her husband, Charles, period. All she could say was that it was what she wanted and, in fact, she had no real good reason for it. (La-di-la.) I wish she had had a better reason because I would have adapted it to my own situation and used it as well. My reasons were sexual repression and frustration with a disordered and somewhat crazy woman. And, unbeknownst to me, I was emotionally damaged.

So Marlene and I could not really articulate why we wanted a divorce (although I had my reasons). I associate to The Defiant Ones in which escaped inmates, played by Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier, run from pursuing authorities, shackled together, relying on each other to move this way or that. The affair was controlling us both, Marlene and Matt (M&Ms). As I see it now, it was an inflammatory excitement and it would have to run its course. And it did. I did not get the girl. “Alas, alas, pigeons on the grass.”

What I was not cognizant of as I waded into the river of our affair came to haunt me later on. When we broke up, I entered into a deep depression for about six months or so. It took me years to decipher what had happened to us, to me and to Marlene, what had evicted us from such a powerful attachment. She was the first love affair of my life and I had been profoundly affected by it, given my childhood history of inhibition, repression and parental control. The attachment was intense. And like many affairs that begin insanely florid and then crash, I played outtakes in my mind and examined them for any clues or hints that foretold the shattering that was to come. I experienced the remembrance of things past etched in acid. I ran “reels” in my mind, of treasured moments, of sexual acrobatics, of the scent of her neck, the way she wore her clothing, her stride, and the remarkable and long-lasting memory of the slightly astringent White Shoulders, which she wore on almost a daily basis. Little things became big things as I mourned her loss. It took me many years to dispel her image and her memory while married to Rochelle until she faded from mind but not completely, that has never happened; what was happening was my falling in love with Rochelle more and more as the years flew by. As I dwelled in melancholia, as I experienced intense loss, I perseverated over the notion that I had her and had lost her. The summer of ’69 in Woodstock was limned in the gloom of that loss. In that summer I existed as flotsam and jetsam. I could not feel how lonely I was. I only dealt somewhat with its symptoms, but not the cause(s). I could go only so far down on the psychological diagnostic tree of my existential pain. I was limited man.

After working most of the night as a cab driver to make ends meet, for New York City teachers at that time were not salaried over the two summer months, I would sleep the day away, a major symptom of depression. I would listen to Judy Collins’ Wildflowers until Grand Canyon-deep ruts dug into the LP. Listening to songs on the car radio as I sped up the Thruway to get to Woodstock, I wept over the shared musical memories (especially Herb Alpert’s “This Guy”) I had with Marlene. So the summer of ’68 began with great expectations for the following school year and Marlene, while the summer of ’69 found me mourning the demise of our torrid relationship.

Given who I was at that time I will say now that I contributed a significant amount to the breakup. Indeed, Marlene had shared with a close mutual friend that of late I was giving her a hard time. I never learned what that was. It was symptomatic of me and her, in part, and largely of the affair itself, that we rarely if ever engaged one another about the loopy and lunatic play we were both acting in. I associate to Pirandello’s play, Six Characters in Search of an Author. We both experienced one another manifestly, which for a long while can be delightful if not pleasurable. And so it was. Latently there was nothing we could share because latently we were both unaware, we were not there. We were two empty bottles in a Pepsi six-pack. There was something of the ice queen to her, for she never asked about how my daughter, Caryn, was doing in my absence, the impending divorce and the present separation, or the causes of my leaving Adrienne. On the other hand, I knew more of her husband Charles, their dog Lacey, but not much more. It was as if we laid our private lives aside in order to service the engine of our affair.

As we grew apart, I could say now that I was not feeling felt by her, which was my chronic need, unknown to me then, which I shared with my therapist who ultimately chivvied me into breaking off the affair (an intolerable intervention grounded in the therapist’s needs). And like a good boy I did so and immediately regretted it because the decision was not mine, since I was a manipulated puppet. I later experienced a justified, well-earned resentment for her grotesque intervention. I learned a great deal from the therapeutic abuse done to me and when I came to practice, I avoided as diligently as I could her mistakes with me.

As a contrast to her, I could not imagine Rochelle, my second wife, who I married in February 1970 and who died in an accident in 1999, ever not showing interest in these details. In fact, when she was a child, Caryn bonded well with Rochelle. I do think that men are better off, if they can put their pride and pools of simmering testosterone aside and marry women emotionally and psychologically wiser than they are. And for 29 years I played catch-up to Rochelle.

What really boggled my mind then was that within six months Marlene had found another man in the school (she didn’t look far and wide, which was puzzling-and hurtful to me at the time): a gym teacher who was big and hefty like her first husband Charles (hmmm). I could not grasp, dense as I was at the time, after such a profound, at least, sexual experience with one another, how she could so quickly take her feelings and attach them to another (feeling hurt and rejected by me, and being fickle as well if not shallow) so quickly and so fast. I believe in 1970 she became pregnant with her first child. There were two girls and one son in her family. Her oldest daughter, Mara, died of uterine cancer at 38. Marlene died of pancreatic cancer and spent her final days in a hospice, dying in 2012. One year later her other daughter, Leah, was brutally murdered in her apartment. So, the son and brother, Steve, has seen three women perish in his family, which is a horrendous blow. I don’t know how he gets up in the morning. And the man Marlene wed in 1970, David, is living – but he divorced Marlene! I am curious about the reasons. I will never get answers. From 1969 to 2012, from age 24 to 68, Marlene was and was not. Since she was my first deep attachment to a woman, my first love affair, she has left an eternal imprint. What good is any human life if one has not been deeply touched, moved or loved? Tennyson said it best: “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”