Falling In and Out of Love with Susan

"Do you always judge people before you get to know them?" Her words struck me like a dagger, but she was right. I had judged her unmercifully and, of course, unfairly and incorrectly.

She got up and left the room. I followed her. This was very uncharacteristic of me. I didn't follow her to apologize, although an apology was very much in order. I followed her to ask her for a date. I was a shy Southern boy lacking in social graces, lower middle class at best. Susan was obviously way above “my class”.

She was ascending the oval staircase to her dorm room on the second floor of the co-ed dormitory we lived in. She was two steps from the top when I caught up with her and yelled, "Susan, you're right. I did judge your much to prematurely. Will you give me a chance to get to know you better? Will you go out with me this Friday?"

"Alright." And then she vanished onto her floor. No inquiry where we were going. No demand for an apology. No questions about my motives. I knew I would see her in the next three days, and we could iron out the details.

Harvard was very liberal back then. I’m a bit more conservative in my politics. We were watching the 1970 mid-term election returns. The liberals in the room were in agony as they watched their icons fall like dominoes. Republican Lowell Weicker defeated Democrat Thomas Dodd. Bill Brock in Tennessee defeated Al Gore, Sr., John Beall defeated Joe Tydings in Maryland. And James Buckley defeated Democrat Charles Goodell in New York, of all places. It was a bad night for the Democrats. I assumed Susan was a typical limousine liberal from the upper East side of Manhattan and harassed her unmercifully all night as each domino fell. Other than my engaging in stereotyping, she gave no indication of how she felt politically. She and I were the last two people in the commons room when she had had enough – of me, not necessarily of the results – and got up to leave. That’s the point where she struck the dagger.  

We agreed that I would take her to supper at the Lincoln's Inn Society Club House. That was a private eating club for Harvard Law School students. I was out of my element in ever having been invited to join the society, but that characterized my whole relationship with Harvard and Susan. We sat with Edward and Tricia Cox that evening. Believe me, that was pure happenstance. If I was out of my element with Susan, I was certainly out of my element in dining with Richard Nixon's daughter and son-in-law. There just happened to be two empty seats at the table for six.

After supper, we returned to my room in the dorm -- the Bernice Cronkhhite Center -- known as the Radcliffe Graduate Center. I and 19 of my friends had been the first males selected to make the center co-educational. Susan was one of about 120 women residents, almost exclusively Harvard graduate students.

We drank wine. We talked. The conversation was delightful. We got to know each other.

I fell in love with Susan that night.

And, no, I don't mean to say we did anything which my genteel Southern upbringing would have considered untoward. Let me fill in some more of the background. I had been admitted to Harvard in 1967. I had outstanding grades, a 3.67 in Physics at a southern land-grant college. I did have my membership in Phi Beta Kappa and a cum laude degree. Apparently, I had enough extra-curricular activity on my resume to sneak by the admissions committee. But my 3 years of teaching high school Physics is apparently what attracted the eye of the committee. But there's no question I felt decidedly inferior to my other classmates. I used to explain to them, when they questioned me why is was there, "I'm the geographic distribution."

Susan, on the other hand, belonged at Harvard. She had a degree from Vassar and was working on her Ph. D in Art History. She also had spent two years between Vassar and Harvard which would have been attractive to the admission committee, but she really didn't need this bit of overkill. She had spent the two years doing art restoration in Venice after the devastating floods of 1966. She let it slip out that she had also done some smuggling during that period, but it was not clear of what. She was in many ways a woman of mystery, even to me who became perhaps her closest friend.

One evening, I was playing chess with another resident of our dorm. Susan joined us, quietly, as a kibitzer. I knew her intellectual curiosity was piqued, but she said nothing. “Do you play?”

“No, no one ever taught me how.” I showed her the basic moves and gave her a little of the theory and a lesson in the strategy. I asked her if she wanted to play a game. I taught her the Guioco Piano opening. The opening, 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Bc5, is simple, intuitive and safe. It’s not going to permit a novice who employs it to get into too much trouble.

I beat her the first two games we played. I wasn’t about to pander to her by deliberately losing. She would have been insulted. The third game we played, on the 3^rd move, she, playing white, advanced her bishop one extra square putting pressure on the knight which defends the e-5 pawn and introduces an extra layer of subtlety, tension and sophistication. I hadn’t taught her the move, nor had she learned it in a book. Her intuition told her this was a better move than the simple moves I had taught her. She had stumbled into the Ruy Lopez opening, a whole other level of sophistication. She beat me. I never beat her again.

We, at her insistence, kept our relationship quiet. To this day, I seriously doubt if any of our dorm mates even knew we were dating. But she gradually opened up to me and shared some of her innermost thoughts with me. Her mother had died from cancer about 4 years earlier. She had been raised as a Catholic, her mother’s religion. Her father, whom she loved and who loved her, was Jewish. She had been adopted and this explains why she felt she was always an outsider. She deeply resented the fact that her father’s relatives constantly referred to her as “the shiksa”.

She dropped out of school in March. She gave me no hint she was even contemplating this move. She didn’t discuss it with me but one day I saw her loading all her belongings into her father’s Mercedes. She was returning to her townhouse on East 83rd street in Manhattan, just three blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I didn’t hear from her for 6 months. Out of respect for her privacy, I didn’t try to contact her. In September, when I returned to school for my third year, I was watching the news in the commons room. There was a story about the grand opening of the Kennedy Center. I said to myself, “Susan is there.”

The next night, at midnight, my phone rang. “Michael, this is Susan.” She finessed the past 6 months of silence and I didn’t probe. “I just flew in from Washington. I was at the opening of the Kennedy Center.” She described the performance of Bernstein’s Mass and what a gala evening it was. She was in her element.

She told me she was working as an airline security analyst at Donaldson Lufkin and Jenrette. “Susan, what do you know about security analysis?”

“I’ve been doing research since I was in junior high school. The methodology of research can be applied just as easily to financial instruments as Greek amphora.” Of course, it could. Only Susan would have come up with that phrasing. If anyone could pull off that career change, Susan could.

I tried to get a job in New York. My fall back position was a job in my hometown. On a lark, I interviewed with Honolulu firms and got two job offers. At Christmas, I visited Susan. I wanted to see if there was any future for us before I made my career decision. She took me to a Szechuan restaurant, my first Szechuan meal, Szechuan shrimp. I gave her a modern stainless-steel stylized chess set. As we talked, it was clear to me that I should take the job in Honolulu.

In the spring of 1974, I get a call from Susan. We really had not stayed in touch. The call was out of the ordinary, but not completely so. “Michael, this is Susan. Before you left for Hawaii, you said I could come visit you any time. I’d like to come see you.” We’re talking about a 6,000-mile trip. It was clear this wasn’t just a weekend drop in, but I didn’t ask too many questions. I was delighted to know that she was coming. I would be glad to take whatever I could get. Because of her desire for privacy, and because of my timidity, I didn’t ask any questions. None.

She arrived a few days later. She had a three-piece luggage set; it was obvious she planned on staying awhile. She told me she had only bought a one-way ticket but gave no indication how long she planned on staying.

The first few days in Hawaii, we did the usual touristy things. We caught up a little on what each of us had been doing, but nothing more than that. She called her father to let him know she had arrived safely. She called him once more, about 3 weeks later. But she made no more calls to him. Her entire stay then, she didn’t call anyone else, certainly no other romantic interest.

On a lark, I took Susan to a Zatoichi movie. Zatoichi is a fictional character featured in a series of Japanese films. The main character is a blind masseuse and sword master (samurai). You can see there is a certain element of comedy implied just from the premise. I wasn’t sure how her sophisticated sensibilities would react to the film, but she loved it. When we came out, she couldn’t contain her enthusiasm for the cinematography. This is a woman who once took me to an Eric Rohmer “retrospective”, her term, where I had to endure “Le Genou de Claire”.

One weekend, we went to the Big Island to see the volcanoes. We landed in Kona and circled the island clockwise. We passed some markers that marked “The Lava Flow of 1801” and “1859” and “1919”. We passed through the pineapple fields and then we came to the sugar cane fields. I narrated, “That’s were sugar comes from.”

“Where’s the sugar?”

I explained, “it has to be processed and refined from the cane.” She clearly didn’t understand and was still puzzled.

I asked her, “Where do you think the sugar comes from?”

“I, I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it. I just figured there would be trees with little white cubes hanging from them.” This sophisticated woman could be quite naïve.

As we got near Kilauea volcano, the lava flow markers kept getting closer chronologically. It was 1974, but we passed markers that announced “The Lava Flow of December 29, 1969” and “The Lava Flow of July 19, 1974”. A primitive sense of fear gripped her as she realized how recent these acts of nature were. She grabbed my arm for reassurance, “I remember what I was doing that day!”

We wandered into a souvenir store and she was drawn to a preserved pufferfish. His body was as round as a balloon and it was covered with spikes. She picked it up, studied it, and announced to me, “This is me. Whenever anyone gets close to me, I blow myself up and put out a shield of spikes.” Knowing how much she valued her privacy and didn’t like opening up to people, I had to agree. I was also quite flattered that she had selected me to be one of her best friends. She once called me her human valium tablet.

After she had been there five weeks, one of the partners in my firm invited me and two other associates to spend the weekend with him in his “shack” on Maui. The four of us were avid bridge players and it was shaping up as a weekend of bridge, fishing and eating native Hawaiian food, ono sashimi, kalua pig, lomi lomi salmon. I told him I had to beg off since I had a visitor from the mainland, a malihini. He said he would be delighted to have her join us.

I explained to Susan that this was a real opportunity, for both of us, but I warned her the conditions would be quite primitive. We would all be sleeping in sleeping bags on the floor, but she was all in.

Sunday morning, the caretaker husband and wife we had met two days before were joined by their three children. Akumi, the boy, was about 8 years old. His head was horribly deformed. His eyes pointed in different directions. His smile, which he always had, was in no way fixed by his deformity but it was a genuine display of his attitude. Other than his appearance, he was in every other way “normal”, of average intelligence, and a part of the family, accepted by all.

Susan became sullen for the rest of the morning. Around noon, she asked if we could return to Honolulu early. I asked the rest of our party if they minded if we left early. I think the other three were only sorry to lose the fourth for bridge for the rest of the day.

We rescheduled our flight, but we had about an hour to kill. Susan was still in a funk and we went to the sea wall in Lahaina to kill time. We sat there overlooking Lanai, Molokai and Kahoolawe. Susan started talking about Akumi.

“Michael, did you see the way Akumi was a normal part of that whole group, not just his family, but the five visitors. In New York, Akumi would have been put away in an institution never to have been seen by his family again.” She grabbed my hand, looked me in the eye. “I am so glad you let me come visit you. I needed to get away from New York, and this was the perfect place for me to come. This place is so genuine and so much better than where I came from.”

I finally decided it was time to ask a few questions. “Susan, I’m delighted you came her to see me, but why did you come?”

She became deadly serious, “I came here to have my nervous breakdown.”

She then spent the next four days doing exactly that. Her drug of choice was alcohol. Sure, I knew we both enjoyed Black Jack, and maybe she did drink a little too much, but I never realized it elevated to the level of alcoholism. She spent the next four days in a drunken stupor. She became combative with me, argumentative, belligerent, paranoid. She demanded I go buy her more Jack Daniels. I refused. I didn’t stay with her during the day, and she used my absence to make it to the liquor store. It was about Tuesday night when I fell out of love with Susan.

When she woke up from her 4-day drinking bout, she announced it was time for her to go home. I didn’t argue with her.

She returned home and I knew that was the end of our relationship. She wasn’t a letter writer, there was no email, no social media, but I realized I might get an occasional telephone call from her, but that was going to be all.

Her birthday was March 15. “Beware the ides of March,” she warned me. I bought a pufferfish and had it mailed to her. The package came back two weeks later, battered and falling apart. Leimomi, the firm’s mail clerk, came rushing into my office with the package. She was nearly in tears, “This came back marked, ‘return to sender, addressee deceased.’”

Somehow, I was not surprised. The question in my mind was whether she had committed suicide or was a victim of a homicide. I didn’t even consider death from natural causes, unless you considered suicide by someone who had made at least two previous attempts or someone who engaged in rough sex as “natural”.

I made some half-hearted attempts to find out more about her death, but to no avail. I didn’t bother trying to contact her father.

She made me a better person. I’m glad I got to know her. She made me better in small trivial, subtle ways; but better none the less. When I first introduced myself as “Mike” she said, “That’s too harsh. Do you mind if I call you Michael? It’s much softer.” When I once called her “Sue” she corrected me, “Susan, it’s much softer.” To this day I refuse to call anyone by a harsh sounding shortened monosyllabic nickname. When I told her I enjoyed growing up an hour away from St. AUG-us-tine, she corrected me, “St. Au-GUS-tin.” She could pull it off and not appear overly pedantic.

She taught me how to go to a museum. Her favorite museum was The Frick, which is now my favorite museum and which I visit every trip to New York.

I needed this episode to give me closure on my dream of a love affair that was doomed from its inception. I couldn’t save Susan; even I couldn’t get past her prickly exterior.