The other wives tried very hard to include me in their artificial social whirl: coffee mornings, lunch dates, baby-sitting, play dates for children I didn’t have, and ‘drinks with the girls’.
They weren’t unkind, merely satisfied with their lives; happy at home and fulfilled with their roles in a way I could never be. I was too young, too myopic and too self-contained to see the pitfalls of my willful isolation. I went to their book club once, but when I found they preferred bestsellers and romances to the chilling wildness of Hemingway, or the maverick prose of Nabokov, I had nothing to say and we merely stared at each other with fragrant disdain.
There was one thing about me that pleased my husband: I was athletic. He taught me to sail a dinghy and later a yacht; I could shoot almost as well as the Corps’ best marksman; I was fearless of heights and I could dive off the top diving board at the Base swimming pool.
Those were the only things he liked about me and even that was limited to the first twenty months of our marriage. He hated the way I dressed, the way I spoke, what I spoke about and the things that interested me to speak about. In the end, the irony was that he wanted me to be more like the other wives, while relishing my alienness. It was confusing and wearying and I didn’t know how to be myself. I think that during those early years I forgot how. So I wore the clothes he liked and kept my mouth shut... a slow descent into silence.
By the time we realized that children weren’t going to happen for us, well, for him, I had undergone a number of invasive and unpleasant examinations and, blaming each other, we had both lost interest in procreation; fortuitous happenstance, I suppose. Sex was desultory and uninspiring. I was uninspired. I was dull.
After two years of marriage, David was transferred to the Naval Medical Center, San Diego and he very much wished me to be friends with the wife of his new CO. Estelle was everything that I was not: poised, charming and perfect. She was also cold, controlling, and a snob. I loathed her. The feeling was mutual. But for appearance sake, we cultivated a chilly friendship. It was easy for her to fake; less so for me. I pitied her child, perhaps feeling some kinship with his loneliness. Sebastian was eight years old; I was 21.
He was cursed with sensitivity, and with his bitch of a mom and his monster of a dad, he was damned twice.
Between us there arose a sweet and gentle friendship. Sebastian got into the habit of dropping by after school to tell me about his day. I’d pour him an alcohol-free limoncello made from Sorrento lemons, when I could find them, syrup and soda. We talked about books that he’d read and I would suggest stories he might enjoy – the stories I had read as a child that were far removed from the anodyne books his mother thought suitable. Together we worked our way through the casual brutality of the Brothers Grimm and easy psychopathy of Hans Christian Andersen, whose little mermaid felt the pain of knives slicing into her feet when she walked and whose angelic voice was bargained away for love.
At about this time my dear father came to stay. My mother, of course, was too busy – involved with her clubs, her Bridge, and her good deeds for everyone but her family. It was a relief to us all, although David was determined to remind us of, and lament her absence at every meal. Such a fine woman.
Sebastian and my father adored each other and happily spent hours together making model airplanes and blowing them up with the powder extracted from fireworks. David disapproved, of course, so they hid much of what they did from him. It was their special time, innocent and childish, if typically destructive play.
One day Sebastian entered my kitchen when we failed to hear his knock. ‘Madame Butterfly’ was playing at full volume and my father and I were wailing along to the wonderful lyrics of ‘Un Bel Di’.
“What are you singing?”
“Sto cantando in onore di Dio, giovanotto,” said my father.