I’ve thought about this a lot, trying to get some understanding. Maybe some understanding will help a little. The guy who ended up with Z, who married her- and I hope they’re still married happily- was in a stable position when they met. So I’ve gathered at least. Her cousin R told me he was an economics PhD on a university faculty. I may have seen him once. I’d gone to pick her up at the college where she was taking classes and came upon them walking my way on the sidewalk. Was she flirting with him? They’d looked so happily engaged, like two lovers not teacher and student- to my eye at least. Was that him or another of her teachers, nothing special between them? I’ll never know. She said she liked him, how he dressed, his style. He was neat, took care of himself. I felt a rage of jealousy. That jealousy scared me. Z loved it.
To get together with Z you needed to be in a secure spot in your life, not the sort of shaky zone I inhabited then. Z was very playful. You felt anything could happen with her. We might dwell together in heaven- definitely we’d touch rarefied zones of happiness- and could go to hell. That guy wasn’t taking the same sort of risk I felt I confronted in Z. So far as I know he was set for life, my age but already on a steady course. He had his good job, future not in doubt. He not I took her. He could handle her insecurity, her wildness (she herself acknowledged, bragged of). I backed off.
Some people, like that guy, find their way early, some late. Some never do. I imagine, this is pure conjecture, that he never had many doubts about what he wanted to do. He didn’t spend years agonizing over alternative courses, get confused as I have. By the way, he sounds like someone who’d bore Z. But naturally I’d want to think that.
Interestingly, Z was with another boyfriend between the economics teacher her future husband and me. She became involved for a period of months- a year?- with an Indonesian guy, likely a student at the same college she and teacher met. Their relationship broke up on the guy’s urging. I know this also from the phone call, our last, with Z’s cousin R. He said she was very upset, disconsolate afterward.
What I wonder is what motivated him to leave her. She was the most wonderful woman in the world, in my view- I was going to say “imaginable,” but she surpassed the imagination, as reality always does. I think anyone else encountering, getting to know her, would have the same impression. Her soft, wild, creative, poetic, fierce character was, to my way of thinking, all but impossible to meet and not be moved deeply by. And yes, she was without question the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen- not only the most beautiful I’ve ever met but most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on. If you saw her, you’d understand my effusiveness here, but out of regard for her privacy I will not publish a photograph of her face, though I have many (I seldom look at them though I want to almost always).
The point is that she must have done something to make the boyfriend want to stop their romance. That thought comforts me some. Maybe I wasn’t so crazy after all to leave Z despite her great beauty, charm, depths of feeling, tenderness, passion. Maybe she had a flawed character.
I talked by phone with Z a few times when she was seeing the Indonesian guy and she spoke once of impatience with him. Apparently he was taking care of his ailing father and as a result wasn’t as free to spend time with Z as she hoped. She may have said she wanted a commitment he didn’t give (I can’t remember).
“I got tired of that,” she said to me. Got tired of his caring for his sick parent? The complaint sounded a little crude to me and over the years I clung to it as a source of consolation. If Z had a crude streak that would reveal itself only in the course of a longer romance than she and I had maybe I made the right choice in leaving her. Maybe. There’s no way of knowing.
I do know this. When I look at the pile of notebooks stacked against the wall of my bedroom, spiral notebooks seventy pages back and front containing all the notes for fiction I took in the ten or however many years since losing Z, I know that all that imaginative writing, the thousands of dedicated hours that went into it, the work still in progress- even today I wrote more- all of it, none of it, is worth a single night with her. And it is for the absence of that night that I have given myself to that work. Whether it has value or not I can’t say- my sense is there’s little if any and one day it will crumble, the paper and cardboard, dissolve into dust and be swept away, nothing lost, but that question hardly matters now. The work had to be done and served its purpose. I couldn’t have lived without writing in those notebooks every morning and typing the notes on the computer afterward, one day after another, year upon year. For want of a night with her.
If I’d stayed with Z, it’s doubtful I’d have written anything much (though who knows). I’d have led a domestic life. She wanted to raise a family. Could I have done that? I’ll never know. Whatever else the fiction does, it reveals my limits.
I’ve been trying to understand what happened. It seems impossible that I’d have willingly cast off a woman I loved as I did Z. The very first time we met I said to myself, “This is the woman I want to marry.” I gave her an oral test at the school where I taught, before the college that became my more or less permanent place of employment. The test, just two of us in a room talking, was meant to last ten minutes, fifteen at the most, but we stayed together the better part of an hour. Z had that effect.
My behavior that has led from then to now seems impossible but it happened. I bade Z farewell forever. The action, like all in the physical world, made sense, is comprehensible. I’ll keep working to understand, no doubt for the rest of my life.