“I love your words. I love that through them / I can see you.”

I wrote Scented Rushes out of a love obsession.  It was a torment and an ecstasy:  I think both states show in the poems.


My marriage had been suffering for a long time, although I didn’t want to leave Gary.  I even told a friend, while in the deepest throes of my infatuation, “I’ll never leave Gary.”  I think I wanted to be true to an idea… and I did, I really did, love him. We were a team, like vaudeville partners. With our combined energies, we made a lot of interesting things happen. We inspired each other, performed together, even sometimes passed a notebook back and forth in bed.  His drawings fill my books; my poems and ideas infuse his comics as well. That was the realization of a dream for me. Even as the relationship deteriorated, I clung to the notion of this ideal mutual creativity.


I always hoped, against logic and the bitter experience of Gary’s first betrayal, that we could somehow find our way back to the condition of Swoon.  I had never experienced anything like it, that total melting in a bewildering volume of beautiful language: that total connection.


And it was total:  physical, too.  I wrote him this poem in early January of 1999, soon after we had first been together in the flesh:


gary:


a not-so-secret

secret. sublimely


cat physique

the first night


cats must feel

like what I felt


sublimely

feline.  sublimely


felt.



~nada




That glittery world started to crumble the first time Gary said to me, a couple of years into our relationship, that he hated being held to the standard of that book. For me, Swoon, our correspondence, was the closest thing I have ever known to a sacred text.


When I attempted a correspondence with the object of my obsession, I was trying to return to what I remembered as a perfect, almost womblike state:  an “island,” I called it.  Well, it didn’t work out that way. He was not a willing participant, although he did keep me sort of engaged… so I did what I could with those overwhelming feelings, which lasted for well over a year, and wrote these poems.


I asked Gary many times whether it was really all right to publish Scented Rushes. He was reluctant at first, but he agreed to it. Maybe he just didn't want to censor me. I don’t know if perhaps he saw its publication as an opportunity to justify leaving me.  I don’t know for how long he was considering it, but even a few days before he left me, he said, tearfully, “I could lose my relationship.”  Of course, I asked him, “which one?”  And he replied… “with you… [and then he added] both of them…”  His decision, then, which was so very major, seemed awfully precipitous – even, to me, violent. After eleven years, he broke up with me on the phone, while he was out at dinner with the other woman, whom he had been seeing, it turned out, for two months. It was very obvious, really: all the signs were present.


Gary said that a covert affair is a “normal” way to “get out of a bad relationship,” (well... perhaps, for him it is, since he enacted the same pattern with his first wife) but we didn’t have a bad relationship; we had a troubled one that was also in many ways very rich and sweet.  We just needed to communicate.  And I think that, at base, he simply couldn’t be faithful to me; it was against his nature. Also, as in many relationships, there were terrible power struggles; these are the undoing of so many.


The new book is dedicated “to an imaginary friend.” I know that Gary must have been very hurt by how I so completely disappeared into a world of fantasy. I completely acknowledge that, and the extent to which that contributed to the dissolution of my marriage.  In fact, though, the damage had been done long before. After his first affair, Gary… neglected me… terribly. He hardly touched me, never held me at night.  I would wake up in the wee hours, go into the living room and cry.  I got fat and hopeless-feeling… and then hostile, and miserable… and he wouldn’t talk about it… and the cycle continued… and escalated… to the point we are at today. It’s almost… a yawningly typical syndrome. It’s ironic, I think, though, given that our union was founded on total communication. What happened to that?  What went so very wrong?


I remember asking him, during the correspondence, “What’s going to happen when this hits the quotidian?”  He responded with fabulous made-up domestic scenarios that actually did resemble the good parts of the reality of the life we made together… but only the good parts.


Gary told me he didn’t want me to write about his private life.  I replied, well, I’m not writing about your private life, I’m writing about mine… it’s just that there is significant overlap.  You know, we are all intersubjective beings.  The things we do affect each other.


Gary got terribly upset with me when I mentioned his lover’s name on this blog, as if she were not a person with a name. I find this a little unreasonable since he did announce on facebook that he is in a relationship with her, and named her publicly there, despite still being legally married to me.  It’s not like it’s a secret. She has a name: it's Rattana.  Hello, dear; how do you like my love? I have a name, too, and a history, and a heart, and I had... a husband.


I honestly thought that things had got better between Gary and me. We had so much fun (and only one fight) in Japan together just a month before he met this woman. And during his affair, interestingly, he suddenly wanted to sleep with me all the time.  Why? I asked him.  He said “I don’t know: suddenly I can objectify you again.”  That made me just indescribably sad, especially in hindsight. Gary just couldn’t…focus. And he lied and lied and lied to me.


I remember just a couple of days before I found out about his second betrayal:  Gary was sick, but he came home one night and drank a beer and didn’t eat anything.  I saw him just collapse, all ashen and crumpled, in the space between the bathroom and the bedroom, and for a moment he passed out: a fallen man. I remember how weakly his hands reached up to me. I got him into bed and brought him a cool cloth for his forehead. I was his wife. I took care of him: maybe too much. Maybe I tolerated too much, all those years, just hoping things would get better.


I wasn’t always sweet to him.  I admit that, too.  I was frustrated, and I felt shut out (he would wall himself in with stimuli:  endless movies, books, comics, CDs) , and I behaved selfishly; I was not discreet about my infatuation with another.  But I was true to him, as Cole Porter wrote, in my fashion, despite the delirious world of these poems. I cooked for him, tended to him, was affectionate;  I can only say that I needed someplace to put my passion, since he had closed off to me.


Well.  What’s done is done.  It has been traumatic, and tragic, but I’m also… in the saddest possible way… relieved. Of course, I write this heavily medicated. I'm grateful for the pills, because it just wouldn't do to lie around in a shuddering, weeping heap all the time.  I'm pretty functional, but underneath it all, the meds and the therapies and the distractions, I feel my broken heart radiating waves of pain throughout me.


I think I have the right to tell my story, and I don’t think Gary has the right to muzzle me. He is welcome to publish his own narrative, if it differs in any way from mine. He asked me not to write about the relationship, but I did not agree to that.  I will never agree to being silenced. I am not assassinating his character or anyone else’s, nor trying to “destroy anyone’s life.” People should take responsibility for their actions.  There is here neither libel nor slander. I am not writing this vituperatively; I am telling the truth, at least from my perspective.


He said I didn’t have the right to write about his or anyone’s private life, but you know, we started off together as confessional writers, writing graphically and profoundly about our relationship.  Anyone with $17.95 can go on Amazon and find out about the beginning of our life together, including prurient details.  In fact, the cheapest copy of Swoon now available is only $3.83: http://www.amazon.com/Swoon-Nada-Gordon/dp/1887123547/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1288009402&sr=8-1


Gary knows who he married, I think, and why:  “I love your words. I love that through them / I can see you.” (1/7/99)



Someone has to write the ending, after all.