I went looking for the previous counselor to tell her I had taken care of this guy for her. I expected to find a young recent college grad who could be easily pushed around. Instead I found Suzette. She was wearing a long gray sleeveless slinky dress that was businesslike and sexy. She was gorgeous and had a smile that lit up the room. She had not taken the client seriously and the problem had been she didn’t follow his directions either.
She had a laugh to match her smile. She was a most attractive young woman. Of course, I found her attractive, I would have had to be blind and deaf not to have been attracted. She had a beautiful laugh. She was young, in her mid or late twenties, though I thought she was younger. She was a recent graduate of Cal, the University of California in Berkeley. She was an English major and probably the smartest of all the counselors. She was a favorite of Susan the supervisor and did special projects for her. Her name was Suzette Anderson, she appeared to be a dark skinned African American. She wore her hair pulled back to a French braid, looking very Spanish, that and something she said, I asked her if she was a Latina. And she was, Panamanian, born in New York, with immigrant parents, she grew up in Inglewood. Like many Central Americans she is fiercely patriotic about being Panamanian.
This was the period at the end of my obsession to learn Spanish, an obsession that got me to fluency and I immediately spoke Spanish which she understood but responded in English. It turned out she could barely get a word of Spanish out. She reminded me of my cousin’s children who would only respond to their mother’s Tagalog in English. For years I used her as an example of someone who at five decides to only use English. My own granddaughters stopped speaking Spanish in kindergarten. I think it was their reaction to the way the Spanish speaking immigrants were treated in their classroom. If they didn’t have to speak Spanish they didn’t want to. Suzette to my surprise could barely get gracias out of her mouth. She choked on it the way the most anglicized gringa would speak.
She had been an English major at Cal and immediately began plying me with books. She particularly liked Toni Morrison and at her urging I read “Song of Solomon.” In our chats I quickly realized her appreciation of literature and literary criticism was way beyond my understanding. She had learned something at Cal that had passed me by or honestly I probably didn’t have the aptitude for at UCLA.
From my point of view it was a wonderful office flirtation. She was a beautiful young woman and we were friends. I tried to go to lunch with her whenever we were free together and it wasn’t often enough, but every week once or twice. She was a bit of tease. I wasn’t sure how she felt but it was fun for me. She had a six year old son and lived with his father, but they weren’t married. She didn’t talk about John and I didn’t talk about Susan. If I had thought about it I would have realized the flirtation was mutual, but the age difference between us was huge. Suzette was younger than two of my sons. I just enjoyed the friendship with a beautiful and exciting young woman. Anything more would have been too complicated and it never occurred to me.
When I left CCC to go to Juvenile Hall, Suzette invited me to dinner with her and her friend Jody. There was an electric charge between us, but if we hugged, it was stiffly. I went back to have lunch with Suzette a few times after I went to Juvy, and it was always fun. We didn’t really stay in touch but she was a friend and I wasn’t really surprised when two years later I got an email from her and she suggested lunch.
By this time I was living in Oakland and Susan was living in LA. Suzette and I had a wonderful lunch. We ate somewhere in my neighborhood on Lakeshore Avenue in Oakland and then we went for a walk, all the way around Lake Merritt, a good three miles. We sat in a café and drank coffee and talked and talked and talked. She was going to graduate school for an MFA and was very excited about that. I was unabashedly attracted to her and would have loved to have touched her. We sat close but there seemed to be an invisible curtain just barely keeping us apart.
At that time Susan and I got together for a week in LA each month, which was OK, but I had long since given up on the marriage between Susan and me and would have welcomed an affair. Suzette didn’t talk about John and my natural Puritanism and reticence and we were just good friends. She was as a friend described it later, an inappropriate female friend, but not a relationship that I felt would ever get beyond flirtation. I didn’t really know how Suzette felt and I didn’t ask. I was enjoying her company.
We got together a few more times and then I went to the Ranger Academy in Pacific Grove, a good distance from the Bay Area. After the Academy, I invited her to my graduation. She didn’t come but invited me to a celebratory lunch in the City at the Slanted Door, a highly rated San Francisco restaurant.
We saw each other after that and then I received an email, our only form of distance communication, that invited me to lunch. Susan was supposed to be in Oakland that week and I emailed Suzette that Susan being in Oakland made scheduling lunch difficult. I knew the mere mention of Susan violated our unspoken rule of not talking about partners and it acknowledged in a subtle way that our lunches were not the totally innocent meetings of friends that we pretended they were.
I got no response from Suzette. As the time passed I realized she had been scared off. I was surprised to think, maybe there was more to this than I had admitted and I found that very exciting. Maybe I would hear from her again. But I didn’t for nearly two years.
Then in March, 2007 I got an email from Suzette wishing me a happy St. Patrick’s Day and maybe we could get together for lunch. By this time Susan had moved back up to the Bay Area and was living with me in Park housing at Mt. Diablo. It was not a comfortable situation and I welcomed a chance to see Suzette again.
Only this time I was going to say something directly about it. I sent her an email and told her how much I enjoyed hearing from her and I would love to go to lunch, but I was married and this was a little complicated. We needed to talk about what we were doing.
In response I got an erotic love poem that took my breath away. Suzette is a very talented poet and this was a very good poem. I had no idea Suzette felt toward me as the poem showed. I really had thought, the flirtation was just her style and we really were just friends.
I was eager to see her and we arranged to get together shortly after Easter. This time we touched. I held her arm and enjoyed the closeness of her next to me. She was shy, but the air between us was charged and it was wonderful.
About that time I picked up Helen Fisher’s book, “Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.” Suzette and I were in love, all the chemistry and emotion that Fisher talks about. It was a wonderful roller coaster ride. I was old enough and experienced enough to know what was happening and our infatuation with each other was like a storm we couldn’t resist, a storm that would inevitably pass. I was going to enjoy it while it was there.
I tried to see Suzette every time I could. We emailed each other and I would go to work and sit down at the computer first thing to see what she had sent. It was a delicious obsession. I knew if it came out, I was risking my marriage but by this time, I really didn’t much care.
Susan knew something was going on. One time at a restaurant I arrived very late, something I never do. She teased me about a girlfriend and I stumbled through a denial, but it was true I had been with Suzette and lost track of the time.
After that Susan went on vacation to the Caribbean. I had already said I did not want to go and work gave me the excuse. I saw Suzette on the weekends and we spent more time together. Suzette was still living with John, but that obviously wasn’t a good relationship either. John and Suzette had a son born in 1995. Suzette didn’t tell me much, but early on the relationship was on again off again and then John moved up to the Bay Area when Susan went to Cal and she wanted a father for her son.
With Susan in the Caribbean we had a date and went to the Legion of Honor. I think it was closed but we spent the day in the City and on the Muni I reached for her hand and for the first time we solidly held hands, not linked arms, not nearly close this time, but tightly held hands. It seemed naively adolescent but Suzette and I were very reticent with each other and it made the romance all that more exciting.
In all of this I really knew it was the infatuation that was running us and we wouldn’t know what we really had until the infatuation had run its course. Being married and trying to indulge an infatuation wasn’t going to work and I realized I needed to end it with Susan. I was really grateful that this infatuation gave me the energy to end something I had really wanted to end years before.
By the 2004 I couldn’t stand living with Susan. Our living in separate cities postponed the inevitable, but when Susan said she was moving back up to the Bay Area I thought I should tell her we were finished. But I took the easy way out and decided to give it another try. She moved up in December and by spring I had had it with Susan.
I was having a hard time at the Park. My supervisor was a twit. I was the lowest man on the totem pole, a probby, on probation. Living in State housing and in the Park is never a simple thing and Susan was making it very difficult for me with her demands on our “landlord,” and her dissatisfaction with everything in the Park and her own situation. Her vacation to the Caribbean was a welcome respite but when she got back I had to do something about it. I was grateful that Suzette had come back and I felt lucky that it gave me the energy to finally end it with Susan.
When Susan got back on July 1st, the next day I invited her to go for a walk with me. “We had to talk.” I struggled through telling her I wanted to separate. I didn’t want to be with her.
She interrupted me and asked, “Is there another woman?”
She interrupted me and asked, “Is there another woman?”
I said, “No.” I wasn’t separating from Susan because of Suzette. I just wanted out.
She said, “You’re lying,” and told me she had been reading my emails. It didn’t go well after that but the result was right. We were done.
Susan and I continued in the house for a short time together. We tried to avoid each other and didn’t talk again. In September she moved out and I was free.
In August I went up to Oregon to see my son and his family there. When I got back Suzette and I went for a picnic at Paradise Park. I leaned over to kiss her, for the first time. I anticipated a light chaste kiss but it was returned passionately and our relationship took another step along.
In October Suzette finally informed John and that started a round of insanity for her. I think it was shortly after that John turned up when I was meeting Suzette at a BART station. I was surprised he was a little man and jumping up and down and yelling biblical insults at me, adulterer and all of that. I thought considering that he had never married Suzette in 12 years or more he didn’t really have that much of a claim on her.
John began drinking and was pretty distraught. I learned he was a graduate student at Cal State East Bay, still a graduate student, even though I guess he was in his late 40s or even 50s and he worked as a community aide for the UC police, walking coeds to their cars after night classes. I didn’t take him very seriously.
I stayed close to Suzette throughout the craziness. John had gotten himself totally worked up, he was drinking and one time he grabbed Suzette and ended up biting her on the lip, enough to bring the cops for a domestic violence call and earn a temporary restraining order. So John was gone in November. He continued to be as troublesome as he could be, but it was over. He convinced the court he was the better parent for Arom, now 12, and he got custody of him.
Suzette and I settled into making out as if we were virgins back in Catholic high school. Yes, Suzette had put in her time at St. Mary’s Academy before she finished at Rialto High School.
I went to Angel Island in mid-December which made the break with Susan more complete. By that time we had started divorce proceedings, Susan was very businesslike and in charge. We did a mediated divorce and had no problems until Susan decided I had cheated her on taxes. She decided I owed her $150,000. I explained how community property laws actually worked and what claims we might both have. She didn’t pursue it. I think in the end if I was cheating on her, even financially, it gave her closure and justification. I certainly had enough blame and she was rightly angry and I was relieved.
I was glad to be at Angel Island. The people there had never met Susan and as far as they were concerned Suzette was simply my girlfriend. Our scandalous beginning was irrelevant.
Suzette began coming over to the island but she always needed to get off sooner than I would have liked. She’d come only if she could leave at 9 at night or 3 in the morning or way too early and cutting her visits short. After awhile it seemed like we were still having an affair, but it wasn’t John we were cheating on, it was Arom. After the initial protests Arom was living with Suzette most of the time. She told me she had not told him about us
We dated for a year, but it wasn’t a very satisfying relationship. Even after John left it didn’t seem Suzette was free. Sometimes I could reach her. Sometimes I couldn’t. Suzette is an extraordinarily private person and it was hard to tell what was going on with her. Sometimes she was available and sometimes she wasn’t. Sometimes she would come to the island and we would enjoy each other’s company and sometimes she couldn’t wait to get off the island.
By January of 2009 I had decided that Suzette and I weren’t going anywhere. I gave up on trying to establish a relationship with Suzette and waited for her to withdraw, only the next time I wouldn’t try to bring her back. The infatuation was over. We went on like that until March.
Then one day Suzette called me and asked me if I was sitting down. I laughed and sat down and waited to hear what she was going to tell me. She told me she was pregnant. We had been using birth control but apparently it wasn’t effective. When we got together a few days later Suzette had decided that she wanted this baby. So with great trepidation I celebrated this coming event with her. We would have the child. She would move on to the island and we would get married.
Then in April we learned that Suzette had tested positive for Trisomy 21 markers. She had an ultrasound. Fetuses with Down Syndrome often clench their fist. The fetus didn’t have clenched fists. We learned we had a girl. They withdrew amniotic fluid and we waited for the test results which take about three weeks. It was a very hard three weeks on both of us. Suzette was mostly withdrawn. I had concluded if our child did have Down’s Syndrome that I would want the fetus aborted.
With great relief we learned that Paloma, by that time we knew her name, had no chromosomal problems. It was like the second acceptance of this event. Times had been difficult
Both times, learning about the pregnancy in March and then the test in May were like a roller coaster ride where this was this excruciating slow climb up a hill and then the decision to go ahead and the plunge down. The first time the climb was a few days until we got together and I found out Suzette wanted to keep the baby and the second hill, much longer and higher, was four weeks and then we plunged down into the speed and inevitability of Paloma’s coming.
That was in May and it was time for Suzette to move to the island. She put it off, reasonably enough, until Arom graduated from Sierra Prospect 8th grade. She also put off telling Arom that they were moving and that she was pregnant. She told Arom about me and her pregnancy as they were packing to move on the 4th of July. Arom was 14 years old and furious. I had never met him and Suzette didn’t tell him anything about me. He was in a total snit, not talking, not helping, he was angry, rightly so I think. It couldn’t have been handled much worse.
In return Arom did his best not to graduate from the 8th grade but Suzette and his teachers pushed him through.
Suzette got her father and brother to help her move. The truck arrived at the docks in the late evening and it was a pile of furniture and boxes that had been thrown into the back of U-Haul truck willy nilly. It took another few days to finish moving and I went over to help Suzette. The apartment was a wreck. We trashed what was left, packed a few boxes and I had Suzette hire a couple of casual workers to help her clean the apartment.
We planned to get married in August. Suzette got very crazy, as pregnant women sometimes are. Disorganized she began concentrating on details of a very elaborate wedding. For a wedding cake she went to a bakery in San Carlos, 40 miles away; the invitations she was hand making. At this time Suzette had some idea I should be a father figure to Arom. He was barely talking to me and rightly so I thought.
In August Suzette and I went to get the marriage license and as was common by then Suzette wasn’t talking to me. She like Arom radiated hostility and anger. That was my excuse to pull the plug. Getting married seemed a crazy idea. The wedding was being put together with no communication or proper planning. Suzette was focused on hand making invitations, and she was by this time very pregnant. So I said, no, we would postpone the wedding. She was angry that afternoon and then never said anything about it afterwards. I knew it was a resentment that wouldn’t go away but it didn't make sense to me at that time to go ahead and marry someone who couldn't even talk to me when we were going to get the license.
Suzette and I occasionally found a way to be friendly and comfortable together, but it wasn’t common. We went to pregnancy classes at Kaiser Medical Center in San Rafael and most of those we passed ourselves off as the loving couple we should have been. In social situations Suzette would relax and we did well, so sometimes that goodwill would last past the evening. Paloma was born in October, more or less on schedule.
Thankfully the day Paloma was born we were wonderfully together.
On October 11th about five or six a.m. Suzette woke me up and told me she was having regular labor contractions. We were living on Angel Island. Rich Ables, the maintenance worker on Angel Island, was a good guy with a very good heart who really liked Suzette and me and wanted to do anything he could to help us. Instead of waiting for the 8:00 run to the mainland, which would have been easy enough, I called Rich knowing he would be very proud of being part of our day of birth for our new daughter. So at 7 a.m. Rich took us to the mainland on the Ayala, the Park’s crew boat.
Everything was easy, there was no hurry or panic, we just wanted to be on the mainland as the situation developed. When we got to Tiburon we walked the four blocks to the car and I asked Suzette if she wanted to go to breakfast and she did.
Everything was easy, there was no hurry or panic, we just wanted to be on the mainland as the situation developed. When we got to Tiburon we walked the four blocks to the car and I asked Suzette if she wanted to go to breakfast and she did.
We went to Denny’s. Suzette ordered pancake rounds with syrup and butter, pancakes, orange juice, bacon, extra bacon, a vanilla milkshake and I think maybe eggs. They kept bringing things and by the time she was finishing the table was full of empty plates. The waitress there still reminds us of that day. It was very funny and Suzette was having a good time.
After Denny’s she wanted to go to ACE Hardware in El Cerrito for a board or something she needed; so we went there. The salesman who helped us had been a medic in the Army. He asked when the baby was due. We told him the baby was on her way now. That made him nervous. Don’t worry you won’t have to do it, we told him. From there we went to Target and Suzette shopped. I don’t remember that we bought anything,
At Target she just wandered around looking at things. We were moving pretty slowly. Mid-afternoon we went to a Starbucks in Emeryville. We sat there and talked and entertained each other through the afternoon. Finally we decided we should think about going to the hospital. The pains had never been terrible, but by this time Suzette would regularly stop and hold herself during a contraction. They continued to be regular and they were getting stronger though not urgent.
I said I probably needed a burrito before we settled into the hospital and we went across the street to La Cucina Puebla, a place we liked. Suzette decided to eat and we had a full meal, taking our time again.
By this time, the pains were coming more regularly and at shorter intervals and we headed for Kaiser Oakland. There is no maternity ward at Kaiser Marin so we had made all the arrangements to go to Kaiser Oakland. Oakland Kaiser is a big medical complex at Piedmont Avenue and Broadway. By the time we were walking from the parking lot to the hospital the pains had become intense and we would have to stop and wait until they passed.
We went to the pre-birth triage and the nurse was very nice and the intern was a wonderful young man. They agreed that it was going to be sometime that day but not soon. They said if we lived on the mainland they would have sent us home but since we lived on an island we were admitted then. We moved slowly, stopping when Suzette was having pains and were relocated to the obstetrics area and made comfortable in a delivery room.
Even remembering it over three years later our experience at Kaiser was incredibly warm and human. Everyone was wonderful. They took care of us like we were family and very very special people. They made us comfortable, they watched, they did what they needed. From beginning to end, the triage nurse to the girl who helped us to our car two days later, people were just wonderful. Thanks to whatever hormones, dopamine and whatever other things go on at a birth we were in a heightened state and we stayed that way, feeling close and deeply in love for the whole time we were there and loved by everyone around us.
After 11:00 p.m. the labor contractions strengthened and started to become unbearable. Suzette was in great pain and not her stoic self at all. At one point, she started saying “No mas! No mas! No mas!” The nurses all looked at me, they had no idea that Suzette was latina and pushed to her limit she reverted to her childhood language. Coincidentally as she switched to Spanish the baby crowned and a few minutes after midnight Paloma was born. Unfortunately the baby had picked up the drugs used to dampen Suzette’s pain and the first half hour a neo-natal intensive care unit, six very intense and efficient people concentrated on her to get her breathing and keep her breathing. After a half hour they succeeded, cleared up and left the room, leaving the baby with us and the regular obstetrics staff.
After the delivery we had a wonderful room to our selves on the 12th floor. It was just us and the baby and we spent our time admiring her. Outside it was storming, pounding rain and beautiful thick gray clouds. The first storm of the season it was greeted by everyone in the Park and throughout California wild lands as the end of the fire season. Paloma’s arrival brought a sigh of relief from all of us, the bad dry days of summer were over. The rains had arrived. We had a long relaxing day in the hospital. The next morning I rushed around to do the paperwork, pay $800, the portion not covered by insurance and we left that afternoon and took a boat back to Angel Island through the storm with our new baby.
Paloma was transforming. She was and is such a beautiful child, remarkably so from the very beginning. Suzette and my genes from disparate places in the world produced an incredibly beautiful girl child.
We both took time off and adjusted to the baby as she took over our lives. Suzette went to work in March and during the winter I had a schedule where I only worked weekends.
I had a lot of fear around being a father at 62 but over time the more I get to know Paloma as a person, the more fortunate I feel. However she came into the world, whatever the timing, I am just a very fortunate person to have her. The heart attack I had less than a year later made me feel very vulnerable but after six stints and three years later, I am alive and well and doing well today.
As much as possible I don’t dwell on the future, I stay in the present and enjoy my beautiful daughter.
Suzette and my relationship was difficult in the first year. Arom didn’t help the situation. The following September he left to join his father in Florida. We got a new superintendent in the Park at that time who began to put the Rangers in their place and it became harder and harder to live on the island. The superintendent changed the rules for using the boats to leave the island and Suzette could no longer get to work from the island. In April, 2011, we moved to Oakland and living on the mainland was one less stress on us and our relationship.
I retired in November of 2011 and I began enjoying that. One day I went to Kaiser and they asked me if my spouse had insurance and I started giving the clerk all the information on Suzette and her job. As I got to a part I didn’t know I said, I would have to call her, and then as I was dialing the phone I realized, she wasn’t my spouse; we weren’t married.
I went home with the intention of telling the story to Suzette and asking her to marry me. In our nearly three years together we had become a couple. For some petty reason when Suzette came home that night, she was all upset and directed some of it at me and as she had been doing since we began living together, she withdrew and wasn’t talking to me. I was struck by the irony of that, one more opportunity to get married missed because Suzette decided to be angry. This time I waited a month and told her the story and asked her to marry me.
We got married on April 3rd before a county commissioner and then a wedding with all of our friends at the Unitarian Church on Saturday April 8th. Again the wedding was a difficult event but for me I did what needed to be done, a hall, a minister, a caterer and emails to my friends to come to the wedding and Suzette concentrated on the things that were important to her. It worked. We had a nice wedding. Lots of people were there. Suzette went to work Monday and we began living our life as a married couple instead of just a couple.
In July, 2012, Arom returned from Florida to live with us. Initially he was more cooperative but that wore thin. Arom still makes life as difficult for himself as he can, but I’m less a part of it.
Suzette and I live together better than we have before. Two days after Arom moved in we moved, as previously planned, to a house in El Cerrito. It suits my working class self image. It’s a nice house, not luxurious, on a nice block in an acceptable neighborhood. It’s very comfortable without being showy at all.
My days are filled with writing. Suzette still goes to work incredibly early and comes home late. Lately she hasn’t had so many things going on that keep her away from the house. For awhile it seemed she didn’t want to spend any time with me, but now we’re quite close. That too will change. Arom will join the Army this summer or be shipped back to Florida.
And I enjoy Paloma. We do ballet, that is Suzette and I take Paloma and watch her begin to dance in her pink tutu and tights and sometimes leg warmers. We go bicycling, her in a green seat on front of my bike or lately on her own bike, a 12 inch pink princess bicycle with training wheels. We go to the Farm, a small show farm in Tilden Park and to the snow.
This winter we went up Highway 108 to the Sierras. We had seen snow for the first time last winter in Arizona. This time as soon as Paloma saw snow by the side of the road, patches under the trees and on the shady spots, from the back seat she shouted, “Stop the car! Stop the car! I want to play!” We drove on a short distance and stopped in a parking lot with more snow where she could play and then went on to our hotel and the next morning had a wonderful time just being in the snow.
We sing, we read stories, we dance and I am delighted to have a daughter. I am also delighted to have a beautiful wife who lately most of the time is very warm and affectionate. She is an incredibly interesting person who is sincere and seems to try very hard. We are I think getting better together. And while it’s not quite the normal middle class life that I’ve aspired to, it’s close enough and it has Paloma and Suzette in it and that’s an incredible good fortune.
