Half of Me Is Left

Trumansburg is such an odd little town with all its faded remnants of late 19th century prosperity. The geezers congregate in front of the hipster coffee shop just like the geezers congregate outside the ancient grocery store pickle barrel in deepest Mississippi. There's even a village idiot straight out of a Gogol novel.



Village idiocy is a noble tradition that (sadly) is rapidly disappearing. Timmy, the current Tburg post-holder, wanders up and down Main Street making indecipherable hand signals at oncoming traffic and accosting passers-by with a cheery, “Good morning! How are you?”

If you tell him, “All right,” he’ll say, “Well, I’m not all right.”

And if you then say, “Oh, Timmy! What’s wrong,” he’ll say, “Half of me is left.”

Then there are all the strange little Tburg businesses operating on faery time:



It seems unlikely I will pass that way again, so I wandered around a lot, collecting sensory impressions.

###

Otherwise, the trip was less unpleasant than I had anticipated.

It was good sharing the same time/space continuum with both my sons:



I had several good one-on-one conversations with Max, which I hadn’t been able to do the week before when he and Mia were visiting because I didn’t want to make Mia feel left out.

Bruce Shoe invited us out to Keuka Lake on Friday. That was glorious.

But Robin remains his impenetrable, unreachable self. Possibly less prickly and quick to take offense than he usually is. But only slightly less. We had a mild blowout over his father’s Celebration of Life before I departed this morning. It’s Monday after next at Cinemapolis, and Robin’s done very little planning for it except to pick a time: 2pm to 8pm.

That’s six hours he’s got to fill up.

“Food,” I said. “You’ve got to nail down catering. You’ve got to think about music, and a photo slide show, and how you want to arrange the furniture. Do you want to display actual photos of your Dad? You’ll want a guestbook. And some kind of programming. Do you want to ask some people to speak? They’ll have to have some time to prepare their speeches. And then maybe open the floor up for other people to share their memories of Ben—“

“You’ve already said all this,” Robin snapped.

Yes. And you haven’t done a fucking thing about it, so I’m saying it again, I thought.

But did not verbalize that thought.

Instead, I assumed that dithery look of a mother who’s mildly senile and apologetic about it.

“I love you, honey,” I said and left.

How many days do I give him to get his shit together?

I really do not want to get stuck organizing a funeral memorial for my feckless X-husband, but if Robin doesn’t step up to the plate, I suppose I’ll have to. Else the whole thing will be a disaster.

###

“Honestly, Robin doesn’t seem all that different from the way he always seems to me,” Max told me during one of our tete-a-tetes.

“Really?” I said.

“Really,” Max said. “I talked to him a little about his long-term plans. He wants to go to Tblitsi and teach English for a couple of years. I don’t know whether that’s something you put into his head—“

“No. He came up with that plan on his own—“

“Sounds like a great plan. And it’s smart that he’s giving himself some more time to pack up that apartment. Packing that all up in 10 days was gonna be tough.”

“So, you don’t think he seems—depressed?”

“Well, he’s sad—“

“—cause when we were talking on the phone a couple of weeks ago, you said you thought he was depressed.”

“Did I? I don’t remember saying that. Although—and I don’t want to speak ill of the dead or anything—but I can easily see how living with Ben would be depressing. Robin would benefit from going into therapy,” said Max.

Who has himself benefited from going into therapy.

###

Of course, I made a beeline straight for Ben’s computer so I could read up on all his personal correspondence. Is this stalking? Well, hey—Harriet the Spy is my totem animal.

Honestly, though? I don’t consider it stalking. I consider it connecting the dots.

“You’ve been reading Dad’s emails, Mom,” Robin accused me.

“Yes, I have,” I said.

“Well, don’t!”

“Why?” I said. “He’s not going to object.”

###

Ben was a pack rat when it came to personal emails.

From Ben’s emails I learned that he’d been conducting an affair with the prune-faced Jayne LeGro for two months before he softened her up enough to ditch me and move in with her, hermit-crab-like. And that he had no compunctions whatsoever about abandoning me to total destitution.

After I’d supported him for 15 years.

Hey My Love, he wrote Jayne LeGro. Ouch. I m feeling seriously manipulated. Email from Robin saying that his mother sez without money from circus they will die. To the best of my knowledge she has an income of around thirty thousand working her temp job...I don think starvation is an issue. I m pretty angry that this is how the game is to be played.

I worked no more than 15 hours a week at that temp job. It paid slightly under $10 an hour. That gave me an annual income of $7,200.

It was all a decade ago, and I survived. Prospered even in a modest way.

To paraphrase Gerald Murphy, living is the best revenge.

Still.

Ben’s correspondence with the prune-faced Jayne LeGros reminded me a bit of Annabella Milbanke’s prenuptial correspondence with Lord Byron:

On another subject, I know well how things will play out with you and Patty once she is aware of your intentions to be with me, wrote Jayne LeGro. I have become well versed in dealing with ex'es who couldn't care less about you until someone else enters your life and shifts your attention, makes you happy, and becomes a priority.

I turn this over to my Creator that I may be enlightened and with knowledge that I have no right answers. Only experience. No better or worse than that of any of us.

Why, I was a veritable Caro Lamb in this poor creature’s imagination!

And why the fuck was she calling me “Patty”?

I allow people who knew me for the first 25 years of my life to call me “Patty” because that was what I was called before I took possession of my full name, and it seems kind of pretentious to force “Patrizia” on them.

Although the ones I like best make the effort.

Anyway, Ben was never one of those people.

There was lots of other correspondence, too, just filled and filled with lies. The lies to women he hooked up with romantically made some sort of sense, I suppose: He was trying to make himself look good. But the lies to friends?

My special friend of the last few years, Dana is on a two year sabbatical from her teaching gig in Ottawa, he wrote to his best friend Berta. (Yeah, another damned Canadian…) She’s rented a place outside Catania for five months and we went over in May to play house. I could only stay for five weeks. Going back for another four in mid-August. The nice thing about approaching some kind of actual retirement age is that I have eight years of unused vacation time to squander. Sicily is a fucking great place to drink cheap wine on a rooftop, eat pizza every day and try to figure out why Sicilians don’t speak Italian?

Max is a real lawyer now. Robin is a hipster in New York for the moment.

Ben did go to Catania in June, 2017, but he only stayed five days. He never returned. He only got two weeks of vacation time a year at the theater, and I’m pretty sure he used it all. Max at that time was two years away from being a real lawyer, and Robin was nowhere near NYC, being firmly ensconced in the third bedroom of the Tburg digs.

Another letter to Berta: Went out to Berkeley to attend Max's Law School graduation. As noted above, Robin went off to Jerusalem immediately after Spring Semester on a Zionist roots trip. Now he is Bozeman MT at an energy conference before a 5 wk internship in Calgary of all places . When he returns to school in August he faces miserable year of LSAT prep. Max is a lefty concerned with social justice . Robin sacrifices at the alter of the Libertarian Right and big oil . I don't get any of it... Max went to the elitist prep school and Robin went to the green hippie charter school. I am so confused.

Robin did go on a Birthright trip to Israel, and that same summer, he also won a scholarship to an environmental conference in Montana that, oddly enough, was funded by the Koch Brothers. But Ben did not go to Max’s law school graduation; he wasn’t invited. He did put a lot of pressure on Robin to apply to law school, even going so far as to pay for an LSAT that Robin had no interest in taking and in fact, bailed upon taking to Ben’s intense anger and resentment.

It’s interesting to see the prominent role Max played in Ben’s various confabulations. Max, who hardly ever dislikes anyone, really disliked Ben. Even on this postmortem visit, his antipathy came out.

“I couldn’t believe it, Mom,” he said. “I watched it happen, and I still couldn’t believe it. You knew what was happening, what he was doing to you, and yet, you just kept letting him get away with it. Again and again and again.“

And then he echoed the very words I’d said to Sarolta: “Lying like that is a form of abuse.”

“It’s a very hard thing to explain, Max,” I said. “But when you grow up in circumstances that were as abusive and damaging as the circumstances I grew up in, you learn to equate abuse with love. In fact, if there’s no abuse, you’re not even sure that there is love.

“However, you’ll be pleased to learn that I no longer feel that way. Or behave that way.”

“I can see that, Mom, and I am pleased,” Max said. And he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.

###

One other weird thing happened while I was in Tburg.

While I was reading through B’s incriminating correspondence, the television set inexplicably flashed a picture of an empty hospital bed. The bed had a blood pressure cuff attached to a wall above it.

B had some sort of TV service that streams screensavers when it’s not in use. Those pictures are generally scenic landscapes: Preternaturally green mountain forests, serene deserts, mystic cities. The screensavers will stream for a while when no one is watching anything, and then the set will turn black.

And sometimes the screensavers will flicker back on again for no apparent reason.

But this was the first time I’d ever seen an image of a hospital bed.

Maybe there’s some entirely rational explanation for it.

I wish I’d had the presence of mind to snap a photo.

Instead, I got so freaked out that I ran outside to the front porch.

When I walked back inside the apartment, the image of the hospital bed was gone.

When I told Rachel, Robin’s extremely wonderful girlfriend—whom he refuses to call “girlfriend”—about this, she looked concerned.

“I have some sage,” she said. “I’ll bring it over. We can burn it. And say a prayer.”



Keuka Lake was lovely.

It always is.

I’d spend quite a bit of time there throughout my marriage to Ben. And I really like Bruce Shoe and his girlfriend Andrea, who were staying there this week.

The cottage has been in Ben’s family for 100 years. It doesn’t seem likely they’ll be able to hold on to it much longer, though.

All up and down the lake, the old cottages are being razed and hideous McMansions erected in their place.

Perry S_________ died in the middle of a contentious divorce, and because D____ his youngest son is really nuts, instead of leaving the cottage in trust to the consortium of cousins, he left it to his oldest son, Glenn.

Glenn is a public school teacher in Minneapolis. He earns approximately $60,000 a year. He cannot afford to pay $30,000 a year for the cottage’s property taxes.

So, the cottage is mostly rented out during the summer. It commands $3,000 a week. But only during the summer.

The extended family takes possession of the cottage for maybe three weeks of the year.

Bruce told me all this while we were sitting together at a bonfire, staring at the stars. I don’t think I’d ever seen the Big Dipper look quite so bright.

“I’m based in California these days. And Glen is in Minnesota. We can barely keep up with all the maintenance the cottage needs. Of course, if there was some interest in the younger generation, we might try to hold on to it—“

“The younger generation is about 10 years away from being interested in the cottage,” I said softly. “It’s a place you to come with your own children, and they don’t have any yet.”

Bruce poked the embers with a stick. “You know my parents met right here at the lake. The S________s summered at this cottage. And the beautiful P_______ sisters summered next door.”

“Everything changes,” I said.