June 19th, 1976
A day off. Up early with Richard. Sucking cock to pornographic inner visions– smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee while he runs through his morning routine trying not to be late for work. I sit on the sofa and watch. Wondering if I should go into the office and catch my breath on Monday’s deadlines. Everything evening out at work– after three crazy weeks of heavy advertising. I’ve worked the last two Saturdays. No. I need a day off. Alone. By myself in the apartment. To hear my own thoughts. Maybe read. Maybe write. Drink gin and tonic and allow myself to relax after a busy busy week.
I relax awkwardly. So much to do. Should get into an orgy of housecleaning. Want everything to be in order.
The people above me have a child in their apartment. Hidden away with all the panic that I hide my dog. All the people in this building hiding their secret monsters from THE MANAGEMENT. My ceiling thumps and rattles and quakes. Instead of annoying me it satisfies me somehow to know that I am privy to a successful violation of THE RULES of this building. This boring stack of late fifties architectural boxes supposedly rented to successful government employee bores and retried people. No black people. No school teachers. Not too many gay men. No Russians. No children. No dogs. No cats. Lynn’s list of rental restrictions have been bluntly provided by her boss Mr. Rosenberg. Ex D.C. cop– now retired, who bullies Lynn dutifully as part of his job. The humiliation of Lynn to have to cow to his intimidation. No alternatives. It is a stable job– a good home for her and Hal. So she puts up with the shit. She loathes most of the types of people in this building. Just as I do. My claustrophobia here is immense. Yet I have no alternatives either. Moving is simply unthinkable. The money involved would be so great. So, grit your teeth and deal with it.
If I can just continue on until next January. January gleaming in the future like some giant sunrise. With no set backs, by January all life will be in order. My constant dream. No more trauma. No more craziness. I’ve learned my lessons well. Lessons for a lifetime.
The process of recovery has started. Richard and my reconstruction. Our evolution. Reading back I see how clearly that I was never unhappy with Richard. It was the relationship we subjected ourselves to. Confined to the social descriptions of how a love relationship should be. The possessiveness, the jealousy, the suspicions, the hurt. Blaming Richard because he failed me in our marriage. Forced me to play the painful role of my mother. Woman abused. Hurt. Taken advantage of. The whole thing drove me crazy. I remember my attacks in restaurants. The flashes of total insanity that I cannot describe. That I can remember vividly.
It saddens me to remember how naively we created our marriage. How in love we were. I remember sitting at the table in our first apartment on Capitol Hill, early morning dreaming, and Richard saying how he wanted us to be just like a young married couple. And, oh, yes, how I agreed. And so we made everything read just like the book. Just like everything we had ever seen or heard or read. Just like every movie we had ever watched. We subjected ourselves to heterosexual mythology. And it very nearly destroyed us. And with all the ardor of ignorance, we played that show right up to the final act. Divorce. And then the months of pain and agony, the despair of not being together. Wounds that would not heal. Five months of constant agony at being apart. We both lasted as long as we could. Right up to the last desperate moment when both of us realized that if we did not get back together that each one of us was going to die. Perhaps not physically. But in some very tangible psychological death. I would have continued to live. But as some grey shadow of the personality I may have been.
Richard is the soil I need to grow in. There are no ways to describe my need to share his life, and to share mine with him. It is an immortal love story as grand in scale as the romantic fantasies of history. And it is so much more than romantic bullshit. Richard is my father, my mother, my brother, my sister.