So, whose fault was it? edit

I met the woman I married when I was 19, in Southern California, in 1981. She was Japanese, passing through LA on her way to Rhode Island to go to school, and she stopped to visit her friend, a Japanese girl who I had gone to a private high school with. I was living 20 miles away, but when I met that woman, I fell in love, and, lust, I guess, and I didn’t go home to where I was living all week. I drove her to the airport, and felt a great loss as she left my world.

We wrote back and forth, and she came to visit again that December. However, she brought her new boyfriend along, a Japanese guy who she lived with in Providence, and I despaired of renewing the relationship we had had the summer before. I was cool about it all though – one never knows how it will play out, but in April of 82, I went to boot camp for the US Navy and didn’t think much of her.

I moved around the country, training to be a naval engineer, and was assigned to a new ship, being built in Maine, and was directed to go up there and help get the ship ready for commissioning as a US Navy warship. Looking at the map, I saw that from Norfolk, Virginia, where the ship’s crew was being gathered, my route would take me into and through Providence, and I resolved to stop and find that woman and say hello.

I had her mailing address, which turned out to be a PO box at the student resource center, so I asked a lot of questions here and there as I homed in on her classrooms and her. A woman from Peru knew her, and was excited to see a serviceman searching for her friend – so romantic! – and she took me to the woman’s apartment building and rang the bell for me.

My future wife came to the door of the brownstone apartment building and quite literally fell into my arms as the door swung shut – and locked, behind her. She excitedly got her spare key from a neighbor, telling her the story of our meeting in LA -"this is the guy I told you about!", and we got into her apartment and renewed our acquaintance, with a short pause, when I asked about the boyfriend and heard he was no longer in the picture and that she lived alone.

Good enough for me, and we made love then and there on the mattress on the floor in her empty student’s apartment.

I had a couple of days before I had to be in Maine, so I stayed with her in Providence, and hatched plans to return when I could. "When I could" turned out to be every weekend – the shipyard where my ship was being finished was less than 200 miles away, and I drove down to Providence every Friday, leaving at 3 am on Mondays to get back to the shipyard in time for work. That year, from January until September, when my ship left Maine and I drove down to our new Home port in Charleston, South Carolina,I put almost 60,000 miles on my car.  When my ship sailed to South Carolina, I left my car at the Naval Base in Newport, RI, and took leave to fly back up and get it and to drive down to South Carolina.

Every chance I had after that, I flew or drove back to Providence to see my lover.

***

After I got out of the Navy at the end of 1984, she graduated in the summer of 1985, and we took a delayed Honeymoon, driving across and around the United States, 6,600 miles in the Toyota truck we had bought with our wedding gift money from Japan.  We put the truck into storage in Los Angeles and got on our flight to Japan, another adventure in it’s own right, and got off in Japan to begin a new life together there, teaching English.  In 1987, we moved to Portland Oregon for me to get a Bachelors Degree, to go farther as a teacher, and for her to get her Masters in Education degree, living here for 6 years.

We got divorced in June of 95; we had gotten married in January of 1984. We lived in a couple of places in the US; Maine, Rhode Island, and Oregon, and we lived in Kobe, Japan twice.

We separated in 1991, here in Portland, and got separate apartments in the same high rise building. It was too bad, in this way: we had had a two bedroom, 1400 sq. ft. apartment on the 14th floor, with a balcony, The Nicest Place we’ve ever lived, which had a view of the Willamette Valley, looking southwards.

(when I first saw the place I have now, it had much the same view, half as high, and I had to take it – it seemed like "a sign")

She got a really nice apartment on the 13th floor, with a huge balcony, and I got a one bedroom on the 7th floor with a tiny balcony. A year or so went by, and not living together anymore, we didn’t see each other as much. In the summer of 92, she said, "I’m going home to Japan – what are you going to do?"

I said, "things are going pretty good for me so I’m going to stay here", and she went home in September, 1992.

***

We didn’t get divorced then, and I came to realize that "we" couldn’t work on the relationship with 5,000 miles between us, and called her and said, "can I come there?"

She came in March of 93 and helped me move; I got rid of a lot of things and sold my 35 mm camera set, lenses and filters and flash, thinking that I was going to make a real move, and I needed the money. I could always, I thought, get "stuff" again, and sold my cars (I had two by then), a ’74 Volvo wagon that I can tell you stories about, and a ’72 Dodge Dart Swinger that was in decent shape, and that I kind of wish I had kept.

I sold or got rid of most everything I had, or put it in a storage unit, and we flew to Japan. She set me up in an old apartment that her parents owned, around the corner from their house, but we Never lived together again; she worked in Kyoto half the week, and spent time there, living with her high school boyfriend, an American whose mother had moved to Japan when he was three. He was more "Japanese" than I’d ever be, and I knew that if I got all American with him over her, it would be the wrong move and I would fuck everything up.

I found work as an English instructor again, and Private Lessons in the evenings. We taught a kids class English on Saturdays, but most of the rest of the week I was on my own. I ate at her parents house; they liked me, and I saw her sister sometimes, but I lived and slept alone in "my" apartment, which I paid rent on, and I rented 532 movies, in the three years I was there and drank Four Roses bourbon by myself at "home"

No one I knew, except her and the guy in Kyoto spoke much English, and I felt very isolated, and unhappy. I hung on though, thinking "it’s my turn", because she had lived in the US 6 years with me, and 4 for her Fine Arts Degree in Rhode Island. I also thought I had to prove myself or something, and, of course, we were still married. Usin

g my "foreign" name gave her extra credibility as an English instructor – she worked in colleges and Universities – but I noticed that she didn’t wear the ring I had made her when we got married.

I didn’t really have anyone to talk to, and later, when I got a job at a warehouse company, I was the only English speaker working there. I bought and drank a lot of bourbon and watched a lot of movies.

The earthquake happened on January 17th, 1995, at 5:43 am, and although my apartment didn’t collapse, it was ruined, and I had to move into her parents house. The city was devastated. My job in the warehouse survived though, and after three weeks, I stated working there again; she had gone to Kyoto the week of the quake.

They say disaster brings people together, but it’s not always the people you want to get together, and in June, I asked for a divorce because it was clear it wasn’t going to work out the way I hoped. I stayed nine more months there, working and teaching and drinking, saving money, and left in March of 96, after I turned 35.

I’ve always felt left out of conversations here; I don’t have any "that fucking bitch!" stories to tell, and hardly ever ran her down in public; I felt like I had fucked up and sort of deserved it, things not working out.

2 years later, I crashed my car, because I was drunk, having brought that bourbon habit "home" with me, and because I was royally pissed off at other things happening in my life, which I won’t go into now, but life SUCKED, big time, and I drank to cover it up. I didn’t hurt anyone else in the wreck, it was a "single car accident", but I killed the car dead and nearly killed myself in the process too.

It was unknown if I would survive, at first; I was in a coma and the odds were against me, and she got ready to leave Japan at a moments notice to do what she knew I would want, to pull the plug on me if I was never going to wake up again. I did wake up, after a month or so, and I got "better" and moved into an Adult Foster Home to further recover. Right after her classes ended, she flew to Portland to be with me, and after a week of commuting to the Foster Home form her motel, the staff at the Home invited her to move in and be closer to me. She stayed for seven weeks, helping me. Things would have, I am sure, turned out differently if she hadn’t been there when I needed her most, and that erased all of the hard feelings I had and might have had. All of them, and she earned so many points with me that she’d never lose them now, no matter what.

She has come to see me most every summer since 1996, when I left Japan, and she has been there for me since the wreck, helping me with money and advice and just "being there" for me when I needed her most of all. I am a lucky man, a fortunate man, absolutely no questions about it.

We "argued", one summer, as much as we most ever did (which was not all that much), about whose fault it was that the marriage didn’t work out. We each took the major share of the "blame" for it, and "argued" who was more responsible. We finally agreed it was even, a 50/50 share, and left it at that, because it was the Past, and it was less than important for my recovery from the car wreck, which left me very damaged.

I beat the odds there, you know. I lived. I am not crippled, There’s brain damage that affects me now, 15 years later, and the wreck cost me everything I owned, all my meager savings, and I have never recovered economically. I am dirt fucking poor, and the only reason I still have the car I bought new, on credit, in 2009, is because she has helped me keep it.

***

I never had and still don’t have any negative stories to tell about her; that all got washed away by her being there for me when I really really needed it. "Most" people have assumed that the divorce was my fault, that I must have done something and she divorced me, but things just stopped working as man and wife, and I asked her for the divorce, not the other way around.

We have done the divorce much better than we did the marriage, having quit in time to save the friendship. We still debate, rarely, over who’s more at fault, or we did, until we called it Even Steven and in the Past, and irrelevant to the Present.

We fucked up, for sure, but we’re making good on it now and for the last 15 years.

It could be worse.

 

*****