3 June 1999: The Albatross

This might be more fitting for the 19th of June, but after 10 days without a peep, well, here's something early.

As any journaler must, I have considered the implications of people who know me in RL finding and reading this. I do not disclose a lot of intimate or negative things about myself for that reason, though anyone even the slightest bit astute can infer a lot from what I do say; whether their individual conclusions about me are right or wrong I care not.

Anyway, all the people whom I worry about are exes of one sort or another, an ex-friend, ex-boyfriends, an ex-boyfriend's presumably ex-girlfriend, and the like, but also more random acquaintances as well. And people from whom RDC is estranged as well. One of the ex-boyfriends is NCS, about whom I have delivered only scathing remarks thus far.

I was thinking about that, not with regret (because everything I've said about him is true) but with conscience that I haven't told anything good. There were some good things.

NCS and I began to go out in mid-April of our freshling year, in 1987. I came to Buckley 5N through my friend SLH, with whom I was failing Biology, offhandedly dated a hallmate (KFC is a story in his own right) for a few weeks, broke up with him, and started hanging out with NCS. We were lying on his floor talking one night when suddenly he leaned over and kissed me and declared himself. I could go dig out that diary and spill all the gory detail but how we started is not as important as the fact that we went on for over two years.

Actually how we started might be just that important. It was thoughtless, at least on my part; I didn't share his feeling at the time. He was a boy, though, and better company than KFC, and besotted, and nice.

NCS was nice. That's what TJZ and I always said. He was nice, but he didn't read. I think he aspired to a greater understanding of himself, his culture, and his world, as did and do I, but. He would like a thing because he was supposed to, but he didn't put himself into any book or painting or movie in order to get more out of it.

We had been going out for a year when we went to see "Children of a Lesser God" in the Student Union with SEB and PLT. SEB loved William Hurt. She had a poster of "Kiss of the Spider Woman" on her wall freshling fall and came back after Christmas enthusing about a new movie that was wonderful. I said okay, maybe it was wonderful, but where was its poster? She laughed, whipping out and unrolling the "Children" poster for my edification. So I was anxious to see it. William Hurt plays a sign language teacher at a school for the deaf who involved with a troubled deaf woman, Marlee Matlin (I lifted that one-line synopsis from imdb). I wonder what the Deaf community thinks of this plot, in which the hearing Hurt pushes and pushes Matlin to join the hearing world, to acknowledge her world as inferior, and most of all, to speak, which she has always adamantly refused to do. Hurt pushes and pushes and pushes until one night she explodes with her awkward, grating, powerful, conjuring voice, evoking passion and deaf-iance and a soul anguished to be free.

That scene singed the edges of my being and its flames threw fresh shadows on the wall of my safe little niche. I knew it, had known it, and yet, as with so many great realizations in my life, I'd had the knowledge for a long time before some catalyst forced me to believe it.

I ran. Out and away, away from all the audience and particularly away from NCS. He did the same thing to me that Hurt did to Matlin, try to force me into his own world with its own constraints, unaware of those constraints with only an eye on my own, familiar shortcomings, unappreciative of her individuality and trying to mold her into a better complement to his own limitations.

I should have broken up with him that night, when he finally found me (in my room, where I'd been hiding?). He was furious, more with embarrassment that SEB and PLT had seen me than with abandonment. (SEB and PLT, btw, had understood what he had not: that the movie had affected me strongly and I needed to work it out.) I didn't. He had me pretty well convinced that since everyone agreed what a nice guy he was, any discontent I felt must stem from my greedy and unreasonable demands.

That coming summer I lived in Boston with DEDB and was independent. I missed quotidian sex, but did I miss him? We went to Cape Cod for several days at the end of that summer and it was one of the happiest times in my life. NCS used to blame UConn for having nothing to do, that since we had more fun when (rarely) out of town, that it was the cowtown's fault for not entertaining him. I always had a fine time with just my friends and our heads: none of us could afford to "go out" but we were never bored together, or if we were, we enjoyed being bored together because we enjoyed being together. For NCS, though, almost everything was almost always someone else's fault.

Junior year began and I faced the knowledge I had best be rid of NCS. Known and familiar and a good lay do not a lifetime companion make, not when those sterling attributes come at the expense of my own voice, intellectual stimulation, and compatible companionship. I was single in my heart and head but not in body fact or honesty. Junior year went along. Junior year drew to a close, and I found myself in a passionate affair with my best friend, who had complications of his own in that he was going out with my other best friend.

Now this cracks me up: NCS came over one morning at 2:00 or so--how he got into Holcomb (locked at 10 p.m.) he never did adequately explain--and heard enough at my door that when I was out the next evening swimming, he took advantage of my absence to read my diary. Yoikes. It struck me later that he had never come over so late or without calling and might simply have flipped my notebook open in idle curiosity and come up with a scenario justifying his violating my personal sanctity.

In the grand scheme of things, I consider reading someone's diary a much greater violation than having an affair. Ironic, considering my current medium. (I still consider reading someone's private diary the greater violation.)

When I got home, he cut short a tête-à-tête he'd been conducting with HEB to find out what she knew, and then he and I had several hours of strained conversation. (I went to brush my teeth at one point and found HEB lying in wait for me in the lav: was it true?) He refused to accept my breaking off the relationship and asked only that I not do it again, which I would not agree to.

NCS had recently changed not only his major but his school and found himself with new prerequisite classes like basic Western Civ, in which he learned that on May Day, medieval lads would lay flowering branches on the thresholds of their intended. One night(April 30th) my lover, HEB, and I were in my room to the wee hours, talking and laughing, and when HEB opened the door to leave she exclaimed, "What's this?" I peered out the door and burst into derisive, unstoppable laughter. There in the doorway lay a branch. When I recovered and was able to speak, I began "I've been proposed at," I began. They liked the choice of preposition, and I explained to my friends the archaic custom. "But that's not flowering," HEB pointed out. No it certainly was not. The thing that was so deliciously funny is that if NCS had had a scrap of ironic wit, that dead stick, tacky with dew and without the least leaf (let alone flower), could have been a remarkably effective break-up device: "If lovers give flowering branches to their betrothed, then here's what I think of you." Instead NCS considered his bit of kindling an adequate substitute for beauty.

On the following Saturday, sitting on the low wall surrounding the Presidential Garden, when I really would have preferred to be studying for my examinations, I broke up with him again and this time he showed more perception than Mr. Collins. On Monday as I arrived at work, before I'd said a word, one of my surrogate mothers looked at me and said, "Lisa, you look like a huge weight's been lifted off your shoulders. You look light." She is an amazingly perceptive woman. I glanced at her in surprise, then announced (since she'd given me such a great opening), "I broke up with NCS this weekend." The albatross was gone.

Good things about NCS:

He was really good about getting tickets. U2, Peter Gabriel, Squeeze, Pink Floyd, the Cure.

Our sex life was good.

He drove well.

He loved children.

Once we went to his town's version of Hallmark's (a drive-in ice-cream and short-order grill après-beach place in Old Lyme). People would eat in the park across the street, which had a pond and some swans. Unfortunately, it seemed the people's aim was bad, or absent, and the ground was littered with napkins and wrappings. I began to clean it up. NCS began to help. Other people began to help, and other people quite deliberately did not. We got bags from the stand and cleaned up the park thoroughly. In the course of it, a man waxed all appreciative at me, saying I should be commended and whatnot. NCS beamed with love or pride of possession--probably the latter.

When I lived in Boston for a sweltering and swimless summer, NCS came up for the Fourth and we took a ferry to the harbor islands. Not only was this sea and wind and just what I wanted, but the island we visited was the site of a ghost story. In the Civil War, a Confederate woman somehow got to this island, where her husband was a POW. They planned to escape and commenced to dig, but before their tunnel was complete the Yankees discovered it, and her. She had a pistol and used it, but it exploded in her hand and shrapnel killed her husband. She was hanged on the island and reputedly haunts it still. This was a story I remembered from my Loch Ness days, and I was pleased to visit the place accidentally.

His mother was/is a sweetheart. She gave me Banzai (three weeks after I broke up with him, on my birthday, he hadn't yet told her--he lived in hope). She always welcomed me in her home. (His father was cordial, but his mother was a peach.)