The Armadillo Ate My Breakfast

Wedding Stories, episode 3

She’s wearing the green camping outfit, crouched on her haunches, preparing the fire.  A single match, point of pride from her days as a Girl Scout leader.  I’m admiring the curve of her butt while I get the two burner Coleman stove going.  The camping outfit is a tight, lacy one piece from Victoria’s Secret.  She looks fabulous.

I’ve opened the bottle of Silver Oak (Alexander Valley), her favorite wine.  She’s unwrapped the gold rimmed crystal glasses that are part of her birthday present (as is the green camping outfit).  I’ve set up the portable speakers with Van Morrison, (...so quiet in here... ...I’ve been doing some soul searching...).  The sky is clear, the air gently warm with the softest of breezes.  While the Fire Maiden tends to her task, I’m fixing lemon chicken pasta¹.  It’s a favorite that I’ve made for her before when she’s come to spend a weekend with me in St. Louis.

We’re at a state campground in the Texas Hill Country.  Pedernales Falls, the park tucked into a bend of the Pedernales River.  Low trees with gorgeously twisted trunks, Juniper, Texas Ash, Cedar.  The campsites are closer together than I like, so even with trees and bushes providing a bit of privacy we can hear, and occasionally glimpse, the guys next to us, popping the tops of their beer cans, belching loudly and laughing, scorching their hamburgers.  But they’re fine, just having a good time, and we begrudge them nothing.  We wonder if they notice the beautiful half-naked woman, the fancy wine glasses.  We’re amused at the contrast.  But this is a day when everything amuses us, everything feels right.

It's the middle of May, 1994.  We’re in the fifth month of our love affair, still sixteen months away from the wedding.  I’ve told her, quite clearly, that I believe it would be best for both of us if we were married, although I haven’t formally proposed (that’s ten months away).   Lynn’s not convinced by my marriage idea, and she’s resolutely refusing to think very far ahead.  She hasn’t even told her boyfriend yet that she’s made her choice.  And that it isn’t him.  When she does tell him, several days later, after she’s finally gotten back to Birmingham, he’s shocked.  He’d never taken me seriously as a rival.  I was just the other guy.

After our first weekend together in Birmingham, I’d gone to Victoria’s Secret at the downtown mall in St. Louis.  In those days, the bow in her hair was a trademark and I’d learned, that weekend, that the color always matched her underwear.  So I bought a green hairbow and a matching bra & panties set to send to her.  The women in the shop were delightedly helpful, trying to make sure the color match was as close as we could get.  They seemed quite charmed by the radiant embarrassment that’d had me walk past the entry three times before bracing myself to go in. 

Not long after, she landed an important account, one of the “Big 134” – the academic medical libraries – and I bought her a pretty camisole set, the color of spring sunlight, to celebrate.  That season turned out to be a big one for her and for the information services company where she was a VP, and every time another account went her way, I arranged another gift from Victoria’s Secret.  She started naming the outfits after the library directors.  I think the green camping outfit was “Rachael Anderson”.

We’d driven up from San Antonio earlier in the day.  We’d been planning the camping stop for a couple of weeks, an overnight on the way to North Little Rock, where the Colonel lived.  She wanted me to meet her parents as part of her process for making up her mind between Nick and me.  But I’d run out of patience two days earlier.  “I’m tired of being one of your boyfriends.”

We’d arrived in San Antonio separately, coming for the annual conference of the Medical Library Association.  I drove down from St. Louis, camping gear and guitar in the car.  She’d flown over, with a stop in Houston to see Nick, the time between being in one guy’s arms to being in the other’s having gotten more compressed during these weeks as Lynn’s indecision, and Nick’s and my ardor, grew more unsustainable.

She’d been so sure that Nick was perfect for her.  Unattainable, probably, but that served to insure the tang of bitterness that she associated with being in love.  She was in love with Nick, although whether or not she loved him seemed beside the point for this stage.  He lived in Houston, she lived in Birmingham; she travelled a lot, he travelled some, enough that they could have occasional weekends together without ever really intruding into each other’s lives.  Occasional weekends of intense pleasure separated by weeks of painful longing, eating ice cream from the carton while weeping to the girlfriend confidantes about all the romantic misery.  It might last this way forever.  Surely it couldn’t last.  Maybe it could evolve into something more?  No way that could ever happen.  This was modern love for the independent single woman.  She was 43, her daughter was just entering her teens, her career was on the upswing.  She kept the shards of her broken heart securely in a tiny box, held deep within where no one could touch it.  She gave Nick just as much of herself as she thought he could handle.  The tears and the drama and the heartache were all just as they should be.

I upended all of that.  The shift from acquaintances to friends to confidantes to lovers had happened fast and shocked us both.  Through the emails, phone calls and letters – all those letters! – we’d revealed ourselves to each other.  Not looking for anything, not expecting anything.  You know how when you’re trying to impress somebody you’re interested in you try to show them just your best parts (or what you wish were your best)?  We didn’t feel that need, we weren’t looking for “a relationship”.  So we were honest, leaning on each other’s emotional shoulders and finding safe harbor there.  I learned about her devotion to her daughter, her dedication to her job.  We talked about our dissatisfactions with our love lives.  I told her about my band, my ambivalence about my career path.  The more we listened, the more we wanted to hear.  The more we told, the more we wanted to tell.  She said loving me was quite natural and easy, but she couldn’t tell if she was in love with me, not the same way she was in love with Nick.  It was too easy, too comfortable, too safe.  I never made her cry.  How could that be love?

We talked on the phone every day during those months, except the handful of days she was with Nick.  I’d call her office from my office at the end of the workday, and then again after 11 from home, after the rates changed.  She had Nick days and Scott days.  On her Scott days she was sure I was the one after all, and she’d have to figure out how to tell him, to let him down gently.  But that would also mean she’d have to admit to herself that she’d been wrong about him and she hated being wrong.

She and Nick rarely had long real-time phone conversations.  They weren’t friends.  They’d leave sweet voicemail messages for each other.  But she and I had become best friends, so on her Nick days she and I would talk about him, as you would with your best friend.   She’d tell me about something sweet he’d done, or how he’d surprised her with some insightful comment that proved he really was getting to know her as a person.  I was tolerant of this.  It wouldn’t do me any good to criticize him too sharply on a Nick day.  I’d try to ask some pointed questions, nudge her to see more clearly how many excuses she needed to make for him, how so often the things he was telling her about his life didn’t quite line up and could she really trust him after all?  But on her Nick days she didn’t care about any of that.

I was patient, although sometimes I’d wonder:  What is it about this clever woman that she doesn’t see how this guy is taking advantage of her, that she thinks this is good enough?  Maybe there’s something deeply wrong with her, something that is a danger to me, something that I need to watch out for.

A Nick day in April.  I’m in my office, feet up on my desk, listening to her burble.  A long running theme had been Nick’s difficulty in really expressing his feelings for her, clearly and in a way that she knew came from the heart.  He was more for clichéd one-liners, the half joking “Love ya’ babe” signoffs that don’t really tell you anything about where you stand.  But this time, when they’d talked she felt that he was starting to break through, that she could really believe what he was saying.  She felt so encouraged.  “If I just give him some more time,” she said eagerly, “I think he could be almost as good as you.”

I put my feet on the floor, took the handset away from my ear and looked at it for a moment.  Put it back to the side of my head and said, “I’m as good as me right now.  Why wait?”

We’ve told that story so many times.  Another fun Lynn & Scott story.  Friends, colleagues, gathered around a table in the bar of some convention hotel.  It’s a laugh, a bit at the expense of both of us.  A way to mask the sting of the memory.  The deep hollow hurt from decades ago.  Healed, but by no means forgotten.

Scarcely nine months earlier, before the evening at Vivace, before drinks & dinner & dessert strolling through Adams Morgan, before the emails and the phone calls and the letters and “why don’t you come see my band”, back when I was trying to extricate myself from my relationship with Laura without her getting badly hurt (another goal I failed at most miserably), I’d come to believe that I just wasn’t meant to be part of a permanent couple.  I concocted the theory that while for most people being a part of a couple was natural, normal, even necessary, there were those of us for whom being solitary was the default.  There would only be a series of “ephemeral loves” – the phrase coming from a poem I wrote, trying to understand.  (She teases me about that phrase to this day.)  Now here I was, completely convinced that the best thing for both of us was to make a life together, and I was willing to put up with her infatuation with Nick for as long as I had to.  After all, I was just the other guy.

That morning in San Antonio, though, two days after picking her up at the airport from her “layover” in Houston, I found I’d reached my limit.  I was angry.  Fed up.  I went to the exhibit hall, knowing I’d find her doing her job, building relationships.  I rudely interrupted the conversation she was having.  “I need to talk to you outside.”  “Oh, okay,” she said, a little annoyed.  “Can I finish up here first?”  “No.  I need to talk with you right now.”  Outside we went, found a stone bench to sit on.  I didn’t have much to say.  “I’ve had it.  I’m tired of being one of your boyfriends.  You need to make a decision.”

“Okay,” she said, demurely (as demure as she ever gets), “It’s you.  Can I go back to work now?”

I blinked.  “Uh...”  That’s it?  I felt the balloon of my anger and frustration popped.  I was ready for an argument, excuses, storms of emotions from both of us, something wild and dramatic and loud.  A scene worthy of the momentousness of this in our lives.  I remembered to breathe.

“It’s you,” she said again, utterly calm.  “I just needed somebody to pull me off the ledge.  We can talk about this more later, but now I really do need to get back to work.”

She kissed me and walked back to the doors of the exhibit hall.  I sat there, still blinking.

That night we went to the Liberty Bar.   Now her tears flowed.  How could I ever know where all those tears came from?  (“That woman has whole cities inside her,” Frisse said.)  How much protected hurt they signified.  She wept over what she’d done to me, what she was doing to Nick, what she’d put all of us through.  It’s okay, I tried to reassure her.  I can take it.  And that was the wonderment of it.  That she knew I could.  That I knew I could.  That there was nothing she could do to scare me off.  That she could be all of herself with me.  She’d long ago become convinced that nobody could ever put up with all of her shades and sides and complexities and contradictions. Way too much to handle. That’s why she showed her friends and lovers and colleagues only those pieces of herself she thought they could cope with.  She was very good at compartmentalizing.  Inside and out.  I thrilled at those tears and the trust they signified.  She grinned, cheeks damp and shiny, “I hope you’ve got your seatbelt on.”

We’re old now.   A few nights ago we went for a belated Valentine’s Day dinner at the Hot & Hot Fish Club.  Sat at the Chef’s Counter again so we could watch the cooks.  Chattered away about the food, the restaurant, our past lives there and around the world.  The “lifetime of travel” (there’s a whole ‘nother storyline tethered to that phrase).  When I look at her now, the tug in my chest, the tightening of my breath, the shimmer in my eye tells me that she is just as beautiful, exotic, and mysterious now as she was then, barefoot, barely dressed, slender and sleek and irrepressibly sexy, building a campfire near the banks of the Pedernales river.  She fascinates me just as much.  I don’t understand how this is possible.  I try to step out of myself, to look at her objectively, to see her as the little old lady that she’s become.  What time does to us.  How gravity tugs our loosening skin towards the earth.  How the struggles, sorrows, and triumphs etch their histories in our faces, in the translucent skin of our hands.  I see her clearly, just as she is.  The muscles in my chest flutter.  There’s the lift and the lightness as the endorphins giggle through my bloodstream, dancing around my brain and it feels just the way it did thirty years ago.  Hiatt sings, “She’s so beautiful / It hurts my feelings.”

How is it that I was so sure back then?  I’d tell her that we were a perfect match, in the ways that we complemented each other, in the ways that we challenged each other.  People talk about finding the person who completes them, Aristophanes’ tale in Plato’s Symposium, but we never felt that way, never put that burden on each other.  We’d each struggled hard, finding our own paths to middle age, completing ourselves so that we could stand independently.  That we would not need another.  But we found that independent life felt better, brighter, more interesting, moving into it side-by-side.  We tossed the lead back and forth easily, joking that “you’re in charge until I wanna be.” 

When I was formulating my theories about solitary people I tried to imagine, just for fun, a woman that it would make sense to spend the rest of my life with.  Independent, curious, passionate, clever.  Someone who could give and receive the most powerful emotions without needing the other as object.  Rilke talks about protecting the other’s solitude.  If I found somebody like that, I thought, then maybe...  But I’d never met anybody like that and I didn’t expect to.

I was bleary-eyed from not much sleep when I stretched my way through the tent flap in the morning.  But I was happy, physically and mentally satiated, at least for a few more hours.  I’d pitched the tent on a smooth spot, spread my rag rugs under the sleeping bag so we’d been comfortable enough laughing in our delights and explorations, finally falling asleep entwined, sweaty and peaceful, not too long before the dawn.  We’d been in enough of a hurry to get into the tent that I hadn’t hung the bag with our bagels & cream cheese (or was it biscuits & jams?) properly, just left it on the picnic table.  Now it was shredded and the scraps scattered.  My fault entirely.  “Uh-oh,” I called.  “Looks like the armadillo got our breakfast.”  Probably a raccoon, we thought, and we imagined the arrogant little bandit, gleeful on the table, tossing choice bits to his eager tank-like friend below.  It seemed fair.  Life in balance.  Little tracks in the sand.

Lynn scolded me, laughing.  We cleaned up the scraps, took down the tent, loaded the Little Black Car.  We were heading to Arkansas.  She’d introduce me to her parents.  We did not expect it to go well.  But that was still hours away.

1. Add zest of one lemon and several minced garlic cloves to ¼ cup lemon juice and 1/3 cup olive oil.  Heat to bubbling for 30 seconds or so.  Set aside to cool. // Thinly slice a chicken breast or two and add to marinade.  Let stand for a minimum of 30 minutes. // Set a pot of salted water to boiling, cook linguini. // While linguini cooks add chicken & marinade to a wok (or similar pan), heat over medium just until chicken is no longer pink.  Add a jar of all natural marinara, mix well and heat gently. // When linguini is close to done, drain and add to sauce with a bit of the pasta water, bring to a boil, stirring, for another minute or so.  Serve.  Sprinkle with fresh grated parmesan to taste.