Keeping my distance
The warning signs of a failed marriage
Hello friends!
To complete today’s story, I went back and read through letters, postcards, and journal entries. All of these reinforced the extraordinary passion of the early days of my relationship with my ex-husband. You may wonder if that passion is the reason I refused to heed the warning signs for so long.
I wonder the same.
Best,
Sheri
Prologue
I should have known when he couldn’t articulate the words “I love you.” They would struggle to leave his mouth whole and came out like some chopped up, sub-standard dialect, sounding like “I ew ewe.”
Or the time he got drunk when he met my brother and his wife and fell asleep on their sofa. And snored.
Or when he wouldn’t take spring break vacations with the girls and me.
First encounter
We met on Sansome Street in San Francisco, under the watchful eyes of the iconic Coit Tower.
If I remember correctly, my now ex-husband started ignoring me soon after that.
That meeting, though . . .
It was one of those falling-in-love-at-first-sight moments you think only happen in books or movies; you know, like Michael Corleone and Apollonia Vitelli or Romeo and Juliet.
Our ending was less theatrical than any of those, of course, but the beginning was sun-drenched and spectacular.
I had taken the BART from Berkley, where I was staying with a friend, into the city. I walked over to Sansome Street from the Embarcadero to meet her at her office, and when I shouted up to the 2nd-story office window as directed, he poked his head out to answer instead of her.
I guess you’d call that fate because that’s exactly when Cupid’s arrow shot us both straight to the heart.
We then spent some electrically charged times together after that, getting to know each other inside and out: meals at his favorite restaurants, movies, dancing, and yeah, fucking. I mean, at the time, and for a very long time after, it seemed like something more romantic than that.
“Making” love.
But two things happened soon after we met that should have been a warning to me. Bright red flags.
Early warning signals
The very first red flag was when he told me my poem was not a poem. But that’s a story for another time.
The second time was when my return flight to New York got rescheduled for the next morning.
He had dropped me off and driven away, apparently relieved to see me off. After American Airlines announced the cancellation, I tried calling him. There was no answer either at work or at home.
This happened in the pre-cell-phone era. When I couldn’t get in touch with him, I called his neighbor and best friend, who graciously drove out to the airport to pick me up and deliver me back to the warehouse.
When G arrived home, I surprised him with myself.
No.
I disappointed him.
He barely spoke to me the entire evening. I didn’t even know if I should climb up to the loft bed to sleep with him. I did, though, and it was the first time we didn’t make love before going to sleep together.
Just as had happened with the poem that he said wasn’t a poem, he couldn’t explain to me why my reappearing at the warehouse was such a disappointment.
Such a red-flag moment dressed up as an anomaly.
Take a hike!
I probably should have told him to take a hike, but instead I went on a hike with him. Several, in fact.
He was excited to share this outdoorsman side of himself.
Despite having lived in the desert for a few years, my core being was urban. I’d kept a decent pace as we made our way up the trail, but for much of the way, I felt like I was just keeping up, as he was constantly a good 30 feet ahead of me.
When we got to a hill of boulders, I was hesitant. I didn’t really think I could do it. He grabbed my pack off my back and climbed the entire way carrying two packs.
He just seemed determined.
I was humiliated.
Should I have been grateful?
Do you really want to take this young woman?
After about a year of travel between New York City and San Francisco, he moved east to live with me. We’d had endless discussions of who would move where, but I had lived in several different places, and he had only lived in the Bay Area.
So, he drove cross-country with a friend, whom he dropped off in Nashville. Within two weeks of living here, his Toyota pickup got stolen.
Fairly typical New York story? Or a possible red flag? He took it in stride, saying he guessed he didn’t need a car in the city, and proceeded to rebuild the loft in my studio apartment. I didn’t really see the need, but he claimed it wasn’t sturdy enough.
He wanted to make his own mark.
Within a couple of years, we moved next door to a one-bedroom apartment, and it was there that I experienced a wave of red flags.
One was a series of cancelled dinner reservations, after which it became evident that he was attempting to propose marriage but couldn’t bring himself to do so. He insisted on the formality but resisted the actual execution of the proposal.
He was scared.
I was pissed.
I didn’t really care about the proposal or even a wedding. But I did want to be married. When he faltered on the proposal and proved he couldn’t commit, I ran away to visit a friend in Italy and distance myself from him. To re-evaluate this situation.
When I returned from my travels, we simply agreed to marry.
In June 1990, after failing to find a suitable venue in New York City, we took our vows in Healdsburg, California, in the wine country that he loved so much.
The day I saw my future 30 feet ahead of me.
A little over 30 years after first meeting him, I watched from behind as my husband and our two girls walked home from an expedition uptown.
I see him still, a shopping bag on his arm, walking even faster than the girls, his girls, and they trying to keep up with him.
They were just out of their teens around then, and had the energy and inclination to keep up with him. At that point, I no longer even tried.
I preferred to keep my distance.
We had just eaten lunch at the Dinosaur Barbeque and then went for a small shopping at the Fairway market that used to occupy a huge warehouse space around 125th just off the Henry Hudson Parkway.
On the return trip, tired from the 2-plus-mile walk there, the meal, and the grocery shopping, I hung back both out of resistance and necessity. And I snapped two photos of the three of them.
From behind.
I would adopt that technique of photographing people from behind much later, without recognizing that I’d been photographing my husband like that ever since I met him.
But on that day, in 2016, married and with two nearly adult daughters, I took the first photo from behind them on the steps known variously as the St. Clair’s stairs, the St. Clair’s Place stairs, or as the “Death Wish” stairs from the movie of the same name. The stairs begin on the western side of Riverside Drive, and take you to a tunnel through which you walk beside the Riverside Drive Viaduct and end up on the other side of Riverside Drive, which is essentially a service road.
Passing through the tunnel, the kids somehow got ahead of him, and he was the one left behind.
That was the second image I took the day I saw my future 30 feet ahead of me.
It was a future in which I’d keep my distance from him, on my own terms.
I indeed experienced a lot of pain in this relationship, but it’s also the case that I had a good decade of love and companionship. And I have two wonderful children. For those reasons, I don’t regret the marriage, just my inability to act on the challenges sooner. But I’ve forgiven myself for that.
If you have a story that connects in some way with mine, let me know in the comments.
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Powerful. My husband died while we were married, so I will never know if I would have taken the steps to dissolve ours. More than 20 years have passed, and I will write about him and us in my Stack because our life together spanned decades and produced my favorite humans, my 2 sons.