Three Wives

Cathy

When I first met Cathy, she was just gorgeous.  What an exciting young woman she was.  She was obviously smart, a bit zany, and had her feet firmly on the ground.  It was in 1966 and we still weren’t quite out of the thin tie 50’s mentality, but Cathy was at the vanguard of the 60’s.  My hair was short and my shirts were buttoned down.  Cathy was already on her own track.  She wore long dresses she made herself, wore her hair long and expressed herself freely.  She was an artist and loved books and movies.  She worked at Penny’s part time, was going to Mount St. Mary’s on a scholarship and came from a working class family.  She did all the cooking for her family and was a great cook.

I had never met anyone like her and she was crazy about me right from the start.  We were both out there, but we didn’t realize we were both pretty conservative.  Neither one of us used drugs.  I smoked marijuana maybe two or three times before I joined the service and I don’t think Cathy smoked her first joint until many years later.  Our friends were the artists of Loyola and some were smoking pot and using LSD but we were high on each other and high on life. 

Within a month or two I told her I loved her, which was quite true, and she loved me.  We were inseparable, a couple in the circle of friends I had at Loyola and with her family and their friends in the parish at St. Anthony’s in El Segundo. 

We were both working class Catholic.  Cathy’s parents were Midwest Germans and not that different than my Irish father and Ozark mother.  Both our fathers were in the aircraft business, doing almost the same job.

Being Catholic and from the backgrounds we were we didn’t talk about sex or our relationship.  We groped each other and made out until our hormones screamed, but our background and attitudes held us back from “going all the way.”  It was a different time and that was our culture.  It seems strange now, but it was pretty normal in our world.  The only thing to do was to get married. 

In May I asked her to marry me about the same time a classmate of mine from grammar school was killed in Vietnam.   So I went in the Air Force to avoid the draft.  When I got orders for England I came home on leave and married Cathy.  It was a great wedding, a quickly arranged event with family and friends pitching in.  Everyone was there, her parish friends and her parents’ friends, my childhood friends and family and all of our friends from college. 

It was a wonderful celebration and we had a wonderful honeymoon.  We drove to San Francisco and spent a week there exploring the City and mostly staying in our motel room.  We couldn’t have been happier.     

Our marriage was destroyed by our inability to talk about what was important, to be honest with each other and to face the disappointment of reality together.  It was also handicapped by alcoholism. 

We had a respite in the anguish of trying to live together when we joined Marriage Encounter in 1973 or 1974.  We renewed our intimacy and worked hard at being a couple.  Unfortunately Marriage Encounter didn’t address our two issues, alcoholism and true forgiveness.  Ten years later our marriage broke up on those rocks and we separated and then divorced. 

Susan

In July, 1994, I was introduced to Susan by Kathy Kenney, a woman I had met a couple of years earlier through work.  I was trying to recruit members of a work committee to form a Community Development Corporation.  The Federal Reserve Bank people told me I should meet Kathy Kenney in San Francisco.  She worked on the same things up there and they said she could advise me on contacts and people she had met in LA.  Kathy and I became friends.  Kathy was married and I think was a natural matchmaker.  

I had recently broken up with a beautiful but crazy woman in LA and I was getting tired of the roller coaster ride of the women I seemed to pick for myself.  The women I was most attracted to all seemed to be beautiful, intelligent and crazy.  I told my friends like Kathy that I was open to the idea of blind dates.  I had more confidence in my friends to pick good matches than I did in myself.

Kathy and another woman, Jan, took the charge seriously and did just that.  Jan’s friend was a wonderful woman but unfortunately not much attraction there.  And Kathy insisted I come north to meet a friend of hers, a work friend, who was just the right woman for me.   

Before I came up to San Francisco she warned me that Susan was the daughter of Rita, an LA City Councilmember and a former President of the School Board.  I had met Rita a few times and certainly knew about her, but I didn’t know her personally and I don't think before dating Susan I ever showed up on her radar.  

To me it made Susan all that more interesting.  I went up to San Francisco to a dinner party at Kathy's house.  Susan was there along with some other guests.  She is a Cal grad.  She had come up to San Francisco to go to school and stayed in the Bay Area and ended up working for Willie Brown when he was the Speaker of the Assembly.  She was political but outside her mother’s shadow.  I respected that; Susan was making it on her own. 

She had been involved in a number of issues and especially disabilities.  She knew Kathy through Kathy’s husband David who ran a nonprofit that served the deaf community.  Susan was in charge of disability services for Pacific Bell and on David’s board.  The phone company was under legislative mandate to provide services to the disabled and Susan’s job was to meet the mandate. 

My job was also based on a government mandate and while we didn’t work with the same groups, our worlds were overlapping.  We had a lot in common. 

She was an attractive woman, 36 when I met her, short like her mother with a manner and style that was strong and forceful, but she was charming at the dinner party and we agreed to meet again.   

She went on vacation to the Caribbean and our first date was in September.  I planned the perfect date, afternoon tea in the tea room at the Biltmore Hotel downtown and then dinner at La Serenata de Garibaldi, an elegant gourmet restaurant Mexico City style.   La Serenata was closed and we ended up at a very good Thai restaurant in Santa Monica, a favorite of a previous girlfriend.  Afterwards I took her back to her mother’s apartment on Bunker Hill and we stopped at the Water Court of one of the new towers and watched the water show, something new at that time.  We talked and told each other about ourselves.  It was a wonderful date and she was an interesting and solid young woman. 

Our next date was in San Francisco.  Susan’s considered herself a bit of a wanton woman, so when we got to her house we jumped in the sack immediately.  Unfortunately, I didn’t find Susan all that attractive, I’m not sure why, but I was able to get past it.  She was sincere but it all seemed very mechanical and forced.  It got better and Susan was a wonderful companion. 

After a few commuting dates back and forth, we decided I would move up to Mill Valley where Susan had a beautiful home on the side of Mount Tamalpais above Boyle Park.  Susan was interesting.  She was successful, doing very well at the Phone Company and sure of herself.  I could see why Kathy thought we were a good match. 

San Francisco was exciting.  I loved the City and the East Bay.  Marin and Mill Valley were beautiful but my fantasy of being Irish working class kept me from enjoying it.  But in a place where I didn’t fit in I had to admit, it was an incredibly beautiful spot.  Mill Valley is this once small town nestled among the redwoods on the south side of Mount Tam.  It had become a place for successful writers, lawyers and doctors.  For people from the City it was a place to visit on weekends and stroll the shops and galleries.  For me it was too expensive and too self consciously cool.

A year after we met, I proposed to her and in April of 1996 we were married.  I should have had some second thoughts along the way but I didn’t.  All of our friends thought it was a good idea.  Susan’s family liked it.  I liked them.  It seemed to make sense.  Susan’s lack of punctuality, she could leave me waiting for hours, her long work hours, and her inflexibility were all there, but she was a good person and she sincerely tried.  It seemed like we could do OK together. 

So what went wrong?  I think we set each other as a low priority.  We were busy leading our own lives and the other person either wasn’t cooperating or didn’t meet our expectations.  I became more and more irritated by Susan’s disregard for me and expectations that I would cook, clean and fold her laundry. 

In 2004 we found it easier to live apart, Susan in LA and me in the Bay Area.  Our excuse was our jobs, but it really was better for our relationship.  A long distance relationship where we only got together one week a month was better than living together. 

That changed in 2007 when Susan moved back in with me in my house in Mount Diablo State Park.   After a few months back together it was apparent we didn't like each other very much.  When my long smoldering friendship with Suzette turned into an affair, it seemed like it was time to face the music with Susan.  We separated in September, 2007 and divorced in June, 2008. 

Suzette

Suzette and I got married April 7, 2012.  We had been living together since July, 2009, nearly three years, we had been in a relationship since 2007, five years, and we had known each other since 2001, eleven years. 

Suzette and I first met 11 years ago when we both worked at Consumer Credit Counselors of San Francisco.  Suzette was 28 years old.  It was two years after she graduated from Cal.  She had a son, Arom, born in 1995 and was in a relationship with John his father.  They lived in Albany.  

We became lunch buddies.  She is and was a beautiful young woman, bright and full of life.  I enjoyed her youth, her humor, and her warmth.  After I left CCC we remained friends and every so often we would get together for lunch.  The first few times I told my wife but after that it didn’t seem quite appropriate to still be meeting a beautiful young woman for lunch long after we had worked together. 

When Susan and my marriage evolved into living in separate cities, Suzette and I got together more regularly for lunch.  Suzette emailed me to get together one time when Susan was going to be in the Bay Area.  I said in my reply that with Susan in the picture it was difficult to schedule lunch sometimes.  At the mere mention of Susan, I didn’t hear from Suzette for a year and a half.  I had broken the unspoken rule, neither one of us ever talked about our partners.  

Susan moved back up to the Bay Area and that wasn’t going very well when I received an email from Suzette.  When I hadn't heard from her for so long, I had guessed that maybe there was more to our friendship than what we admitted to ourselves.  In my reply to Suzette’s invitation to get together I said something about it.  In return I received a very surprising love poem.  And our affair caught fire.  We both had grown up Catholic so even a torrid affair took a couple of meetings before we held hands.  After all we had been friends for six years with feelings we never acknowledged and in all that time we never touched. 

By this time in my marriage Susan and I were mostly angry at each other.  I didn’t feel I was risking anything I would miss if I was discovered.  In July I told Susan I wanted to end our relationship.  She asked me if there was another woman.

As strong as my feelings were for Suzette at the time, in my own mind I wasn’t leaving Susan for Suzette.  My excitement about Suzette just told me it was time.  I wanted to end my relationship with Susan and Suzette gave me the energy and the immediate reason to do it.  So I said, “No.” 

Susan had been reading my emails and called me on it.  We separated in September when she could move back to her house in Mill Valley and we divorced in June of 2008.  Suzette and I kissed for the first time a month after Susan moved out; it was a memorable kiss.  I knew Suzette was a tease and it seemed that our friendship had an element of the dance of the seven veils to it.  

In October Suzette finally told her partner John there was someone else and he moved out in December. She told me it was something she had wanted to do for a long time.  Suzette did not tell her son about our relationship.  After that it seemed like we were still having an affair, only now we were keeping it a secret from Arom.   We never got into a normal dating relationship.  It was much more tenuous than that for over a year and as time passed she got more and more distant. 

And then in March of 2009 she told me she was pregnant and she wanted to keep the baby.  Shortly after that we went through a difficult four weeks while we waited to learn if our baby had Down’s syndrome.  She didn’t.  Suzette agreed to move to Angel Island to live with me.  Just before the move in July she told her son Arom they were moving to Angel Island and that she was pregnant.  At 14 Arom was not happy at all and in the coming year he did his best to make me pay for it.  I understood that. 

Suzette and I had planned to get married in August before the baby came.  But when the time got close things were too crazy and Suzette was overly stressed.  We postponed the wedding and concentrated on getting ready for the baby.    

Paloma was born October 12, 2009, I had a heart attack, May, 2010, and Arom moved to Florida to be with his dad in September, 2010. 

In April, 2011 we moved off the island to Oakland and in November I retired.  Living without Arom acting out around us made our relationship easier. And moving off the island made it even more so.  Wherever we went I introduced Suzette as my wife, including at the church we began attending, the Unitarian Church of Berkeley. 

I went to Kaiser one day for an appointment and they asked me if my spouse had health insurance.  I began filling out a form with the clerk with information about Suzette.  I said I needed to call her to get her employer’s address and her social security number.  As I was calling I remembered Suzette and I weren’t married.  I laughed at myself and thought I should fix that.  I went home to tell Suzette.  For some reason that afternoon she wasn’t talking to me. 

A month later I asked her to marry me.   We were married April, 2012.