Well, I can feel the soft silk of your blouse
And them soft thrills in our little fun house
Then the lights go out and it's just the three of us
You and me and all that stuff we're so scared of.
-Bruce Springsteen
Tunnel of Love
There are a lot of ways a young marriage can go wrong. After three years with Ellen it seemed that ours at settled into something that didn't really satisfy either of us. In the spring of 1981 I turned twenty-six and she was twenty-three. Some of our plans, or perhaps illusions, of being graduate students in some leafy academic setting like Ann Arbor, Madison, WI, or Berkeley hadn't yet come true. We hadn't really gotten our financial act together (some of that, since I was older, was my doing) and she hadn't yet finished her bachelor's degree at the City College of New York - she was already two years late with that.
At that time we were grinding through our low-paying office jobs and we were living in a serviceable but dingy fifth-floor Bronx apartment that had hot and cold running burglars. We got hit twice before we could get enough gates up on the windows. After that our little one-bedroom felt like a cellblock on Rikers Island.
Yet options started to open up because this was about the last time truly affordable housing was available in New York. Out in pre-hipster, Tony Manero-style Brooklyn that were seemed to be plenty of units for rent that would give us an escape from the disintegrating borough of the Bronx.
We had started that spring to follow the subway routes into South Brooklyn and taking a look around the place. I was having positive feelings about these old-school neighborhoods when Ellen surprised me by starting a controlled demolition of our marriage. It wasn't just that I was caught without warning; she also changed her mind several times about what she wanted to do.
Trying to remember the exact sequence of events is a bit difficult because Ellen had two main strategies, or trends I could call them, going on which overlapped. The first thing she did was announce that she wanted to separate from me. The reasons for this were a mix of disappointments from the previous three years. Basically we hadn't been making any progress towards our financial or educational goals and it was entirely my fault; she ignored her own shortcomings when it came to planning any of these things.
Over the next several weeks she seemed unable to work out the details of her separation project and she started to walk back some of it. For a while the separation was supposed to be for a "trial" period. One of her ideas was that she would move out and get her own apartment for a while and I could move into it later if and when she changed her mind.
When I regained my balance I started to realize there might be some benefits for me to have at least a temporary reprieve from her. The three years of our marriage had been pretty tense and I began to welcome a period of being alone to clear my mind. I had gone straight from living with my parents to living with her and I had never truly been independent.
The other thread in this was that Ellen had decided, as an "estranged" wife, that it was time to make up for some lost time in her romantic life - apparently I wasn't sufficient for her. Of course the estrangement kept getting postponed, but in her mind it perhaps was just a matter of time.
She had always been a chunky girl, but that spring she went on one of those high protein, low-carb diets and lost some weight. She still wasn't willowy, but she seemed to get more male attention than she had been previously accustomed to, which had been, except for me, negligible.
I found Ellen attractive in a middle-American farm girl kind of way rather than because of whatever Vogue or other fashion publications put forth as the standard of beauty. Her family roots were in West Virginia and rural Pennsylvania which made her something of an anomaly in the hyper-ethnic neighborhoods of the city. She was dark-haired and green-eyed, and she had the most superbly rounded rear end if you liked that kind of thing, as I did. One could imagine rolling with her in the hayloft of a barn for the afternoon and then she'd make you a nice home-cooked meal in the house before leading you to the bedroom for more sex.
During this troubled summer she changed jobs and she managed to pick up a lover at both places. She was rather careless at keeping these affairs under cover. I ran into both guys several times because she did such a poor job of operational security. In July she just up and went on a trip to the Jersey shore without me; I later found out she had spent several days in a beach rental with one of them. The boldest move she made was talking the second one into helping us move when we finally did get a Brooklyn apartment.
During this period I did more and more snooping around as her infidelity became more flagrant. As Erica Jong wrote, "I always felt that reading other people's mail is the lowest of the low, but jealousy makes you do strange things." Ellen saw herself as a writer and left ample documentation of her activities. In Jong's case it was about a boyfriend of a few months. In my case it was a six-year relationship including three of those in a marriage.
I reached a decision point when two events happened. The first was that she completely dropped the idea of separating and we did get that new apartment together.
Then she started talking about how the second guy - his name was Tommy - had propositioned her and she had turned him down. She cried and seemed upset about this out of any proportion to what she was describing. My investigation revealed that he had actually dumped her. He was uncomfortable with having an affair with a married woman and he also seemed to want a girlfriend who was free and clear of that kind of commitment.
I felt that I had to confront her but I didn't want to divorce her either. It was all too big to merely let it slide; there couldn't be merely a "kiss and make up" with no consequences. She might feel relief for being forgiven, but in the longer run she would lose even more respect for me. I knew her well enough to know that she would consolidate her power and probably we would go through this whole cycle again in the future.
I believed too that had the roles been reversed, I would never have gotten away with it. That was only fair, I supposed, but that didn't mean I should just roll over now.
What method would I use to restore the balance?
********
I needed the advice of another man but among my friends and relatives there was only one who seemed plausible. He was someone on the paternal, Italian-American side of my family.
My father's younger brother, Henry, or Uncle Hank as everyone called him, was fifty-one years old by the fall of 1981. He hadn't been to college but like my dad had gone into the military right after high school. Unlike my dad he choose the Navy over the Army and he served aboard the battleship
Wisconsin
when it bombarded the North during the Korean War.
After the war he had done stints as a delivery truck driver and as a brakeman on the New York Central Railroad. In 1955, the year of my birth, he went into the produce wholesaling business just like his father, my Grandpa "Charlie" (whose actual first name was Carmine).
Hank started his own firm in the Bronx Terminal Market just down the street from Charlie's store. He was ambitious, and soon he had two "stores" or units for the company and three trucks, while Grandpa only had one of each. Also, he handled a much wider variety of fruits and vegetables than his father did. The older man preferred to stick to a few items that knew well since he had started handling them back in the 1920s.
It wasn't a complex business but it was a very reliable one. In classic middleman fashion the merchandise came in through the back of the store, first arriving by refrigerated boxcars on a siding and in later years by long-haul trucks. Hank still had notepads from the Union Pacific and the Rock Island Lines which he would give to me at times.
Charlie's and Hank's own trucks picked up the produce from the front loading docks and delivered it to various grocers around the city. The growers out West and the urban store owners in New York had the wholesalers in the middle to organize the trade to everyone's satisfaction.
Unlike my relationship with my curmudgeonly grandfather, I got along rather well with Hank. Sometimes I got work from him helping out on the trucks. "To tell you the truth," he said, "You look too skinny to handle that kind of job." It was tough indeed, but I survived it. Maybe that helped me gain some respect from him.
When I was in high school and college he would sometimes tease me with statements like, "What kind of hippie/commie bullshit are they teaching you in those places?" But when I turned eighteen he would sometimes take me to a bar for a few drinks; he was the only one of my relatives to do that. He was a very good storyteller and he also was always interested in whatever was going on in my life.
One day I told him I needed serious advice about Ellen and we went to a bar a couple of blocks from his store. I told him the story in full detail. He had always liked her and he told me he thought the marriage could be saved. Then he told me exactly what I had to do in this situation.
"Is this actually going to work?" I said. "I don't know much about it."
"It's not a guarantee, but you can't just let her get away with it scot-free. You have to assert yourself here or she'll think she can get away with anything from now on."
"It sounds kind of old-fashioned - I think that's the right word."
