I’m Still Trying to Figure Out What It All Means — Part 5

Or was I struck by lightning?

A couple of days after my night with Donna in my car, a cascade of emotions began. It became fairly overwhelming. Les and I went to Mark’s place, and we all got pretty drunk. I got sick. Les came into the bathroom with me and was comforting me. It was at that point that I broke down.

It had been five years since I lost the woman that I thought I would marry and although I had been grieving silently, I estimate it took me about nineteen years in total to get past that grief. I had not until this instant in the bathroom allowed any of it to come out.

For some reason which I still don’t understand, it came out at this moment. I broke down sobbing. I have only cried like that twice in my life, on this occasion and the first time that I went to my grandmother’s grave. I had been in the Middle East when she died, and my family had excluded me from the funeral. Actually, it was probably better that I wasn’t there as I couldn’t have stood their maudlin and not entirely sincere sentimentality as they buried her. But that’s another story.

I also realized at this moment that Donna loved me and did so truly. I have never in my life met anyone with the capacity of being able to love purely the way she is capable. That she could do this despite all the pain she had gone through in life was truly extraordinary.

When she was twelve years old, her mother had an affair with her father’s best friend and got pregnant as a result. The mother broke up her family and with her new man, they fled to Cincinnati, leaving everything that Donna and her elder sister owned behind.

Donna didn’t see her father again for thirty years, until I was able to get them back together. The mother intercepted all the letters he wrote to her over the years and made him out to be an uncaring father, which was far from the truth. The new stepfather was abusive. The new family dynamic made Donna the constant scapegoat for all sorts of real or imagined problems. She was, in most respects, reduced to a scullery maid and babysitter for her half-sister.

She didn’t do that well at university as her mother told her that if she couldn’t get good grades without studying that she wasn’t smart enough to be enrolled. It was utter nonsense. Despite all of this, she managed to get herself to Paris and into the Sorbonne, where she did well in the Cours de Civilisation Francaise.

In Paris she was brutally raped, beaten, strangled and told by her rapist that he was going to kill her and dump her body in the Seine, as no one would miss her as she was just a silly girl from Oh-hee-oh. Her mother didn’t want to hear anything about it and would never talk to her about what happened.

She is incredibly strong, more than a survivor and the second most intelligent woman I have ever met. Top place goes to one of my tutors at Oxford, Patricia Crone, who was truly and remarkably brilliant.

Donna has given me and our two sons unstinting, unreserved and unselfish love for forty years now. She is a most unusual person.

So, there I was on the floor of the bathroom, bawling my eyes out while my friend tried to comfort me and all these conflicting emotions washed through me, grief and loss of Joanna, Lesley’s kind attention coupled with the singular realization that no one, and I mean no one, had ever seen this kind of emotional outpouring in me. Lesley had always said that I was like Mr. Spock, impenetrable and imperturbable. And now to add to the other kaleidoscope of emotions, I had this new realization of being loved, but by someone who had claimed that they were unavailable.

But then, about a month later, Donna’s mother intervened to correct that problem and to facilitate matters. It was a strange day. Donna and her boyfriend Peter went out to have the ‘talk’. I was pretty upset as I had no idea what was really going on between them, what their relationship really entailed, how strong her feelings for him were, how afraid of change she might actually be and, during her potentially life-changing discussion with him, I actually spent a good part of the time on the phone with her mother. I don’t even remember how I got involved with her mother at this juncture, but she certainly had my back. Donna thought that her mother was just using her again in some vicarious manner because mom liked me and found me charismatic.

In any case, an ultimatum was delivered to Peter, either treat the relationship as something real or carry on being a man-child, but that Donna was no longer prepared to support his neotenous approach to an irresponsible life. Her mother fully took my side and weighed in, in such a way that the outcome became assured. Whatever problems the two of them had, Donna did rely in a great degree on her mother’s judgment.

The postscript to all of this was something else that falls into that category of unusual only in ‘Glenn World’ things that happen to which the title of these stories allude.

Despite Donna spending most of her free time at my place during the summer, she still ‘lived’ with Peter. She and I went to London in the fall of 1983 and got married in the Westminster City Registry Office. After the ceremony was over, the clerk looked at us and said, “Remember, in this country it is one man and one woman”.

We weren’t sure if he was referring to the fact that we were on our way to Saudi Arabia or coming from California. Donna was of the opinion that he had simply read my character!

For our reception, we played poker with two friends of mine and their wives. We were staying at one of the couple’s apartments and our hostess won some money. This seems to have excited her as we were able to hear them vigorously fucking later that night when we had all gone to bed. So, of course, since it was our wedding night, we had to join them figuratively if not literally.

As it was not possible to bring a spouse to Saudi Arabia until the husband had obtained an iqama, a residence permit, Donna had to go back to California until that was available.

So, I spent the first two months of my life as a married man alone in Saudi Arabia while my wife lived with her ex-boyfriend in Oakland. I thought that she should have stayed at my parents, although in retrospect that would have been a disaster, and she was more comfortable back in her old place.

The things that I’ll do for love never cease to amaze me. The unusual structures of my life even more so. I mean, who does that?

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