We walked back to the Hotel Vancouver for dinner in a huge, high-ceilinged, ornate restaurant with enormous chandeliers. I was in awe. Afterwards, we went dancing at Oilcan Harry’s, a lively place with go-go dancers and a peculiar mix of hippies, straight young people, and older businessmen types.
We danced some, but mostly we sat at the table drinking Scotch and water and taking the whole scene in. The music was so loud we had to yell over it. It was also hot and crowded. Soon Ted leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Let’s go.” The cool air outside felt good. Ted turned to me, put both arms around me, and gave me a long, long kiss.
“I have been wanting to do this since I met you six years ago,” he said. “Or was it just six days ago?” He kissed me again. We were oblivious to the people detouring around us on the sidewalk. “If we keep this up,” he said, “we will have to call an aid car to take us back to the hotel.”
We got back to the hotel, walking some and kissing a lot. As we walked through the lobby we tried to look calm. Heaven forbid that the desk clerk or bell captain should know what we were about to do. But as we got into the elevator, I began to get cold feet. Did I really want this gorgeous guy to see my body with its stretch marks, small breasts, and the extra five pounds I had been carrying around since Molly was born?
Ted apparently felt no hesitation, nor did he sense mine. In our room he put his arms around me and began kissing me; then the chemistry took over. We made love as though this would be the last time we would ever see each other, as if we were trying to get enough of each other to last a lifetime.
I felt good next to him. He ran his fingertips over my back. I wondered if he enjoyed our lovemaking as much as I did. I had made love with two other men besides my husband, both after my divorce. For different reasons, neither time had been satisfying. This was different. We made love again and finally fell asleep about four in the morning.
We lingered over breakfast in our room, sitting by the window looking out at the street and the large fountain below. We talked more about ourselves, about my life in Utah and Ted’s future as a lawyer. I told him about my high school sweetheart. He told me about an old flame named Susan. He had met her while living in a University of Washington dormitory. She was slender, pretty, intelligent, from a wealthy San Francisco family. She eventually went back home. Ted had followed her there and enrolled in a summer course in Chinese at Stanford, but, he said, they had drifted apart. She had a life of her own apart from him, and he seemed to feel it was her wealth that shut him out. That surprised me. He was always so well dressed, and he seemed so at ease in these luxurious surroundings.
Finally, we went out to look at the city. Vancouver was even more cosmopolitan than Seattle. We roamed through the large Chinatown, up through a German neighborhood, and past quaint tea shops. We walked with our arms around each other, moving together in perfect rhythm. I was light-headed.
The drive back to Seattle Saturday afternoon was filled with unending conversation. We covered religion (neither of us was an active churchgoer), drugs (neither of us smoked dope), TV (neither of us had any use for it). We still had so much to cover we didn’t want to part. We stopped in Seattle and bought food for dinner before we picked up Molly. She had a lot to tell us and pictures she had drawn to show us. Ted had brought some Canadian candy back for her.
After we got Molly to bed, we settled down for more wine and conversation. Ted liked what he called my “small-town perspective.” He thought it was less cynical than most city people’s. He laughed when I talked about how painful my shyness was and how my neck and face got covered with red blotches.
We made love. “Do you want me to go home?” he asked. I had mixed feelings about that. It was wonderful to lie next to him, but after my divorce I had often told myself that I would never subject Molly to a string of male overnight guests. I had to teach by example, not words. On the other hand, I really wanted him to stay.
“Maybe if we got dressed before she got up,” I said. We left the matter dangling as we drifted off to sleep.
On Sunday, Ted showed Molly and me his room in the University District. In an immaculately kept old rooming house owned by an elderly German couple, Ernst and Freda, Ted had a big corner room on the second floor, with enormous windows and a high ceiling. The hardwood floors were covered with an old, dusty-pink-patterned carpet. Everything was orderly and spotless—a starched doily lay across the top of his dresser. Ted introduced me to his roommate, a Boston fern that sat in the corner where the windows met. He called the plant Fern and fussed over it. He had a small stereo that he kept tuned to Seattle’s classical music station. The whole place had an airy charm that reminded me of houses I’d seen on a trip to Europe when I was in high school. I thought it suited him perfectly.
Soon we began spending most of our time together. He had a temporary job with a messenger firm that delivered legal papers. I thought he had told me he was a law student the night we met, but in fact, he was waiting to start law school the next quarter.
I was amazed and pleased at how much Ted liked our domestic scene. He seemed hungry for family life. He took Molly and me out to all of his favorite places: the public market; the main street of the University District called “the Ave,” where we browsed through used book and record stores; the International District, where we ate Chinese food and Ted tried out his limited Chinese on the patient waiters.
We made love every chance we got. I had never felt this close to any man before.
I had resolved, I told him, that I would never get involved with another student. I wanted to be with someone more established, someone who could support me while I raised the kids. “And yet the thought of losing you, of not being with you. . . .”
“I know,” he said. “I feel the same way. But it’s as if we knew each other before in some former life. We fit together so well in so many ways. We fill in all the gaps for each other. I look back on my life before I met you and it seems it was terribly empty. I love you more than you know.”
We did fit together well. I believed that the man should be the leader in a relationship, and Ted liked to lead. I liked his protectiveness of me and Molly, both emotionally and physically. I was naive about what goes on in the city, and sometimes I took unnecessary risks.
One night when Ted came over after dinner, I told him that Molly and I had stopped at Volunteer Park on the way home from work to swing, and that we’d had the park practically to ourselves.
He was horrified. “Don’t you realize how isolated you are there in case of trouble?”
“Trouble? What kind of trouble?”
“You name it and you can probably find it in Volunteer Park, especially at dusk. If you want to play in a park, come get me first. You understand?”
I nodded sheepishly. I hadn’t used my head.
CHAPTER FOUR
I liked my job, but the eight-to-five grind wore me down, and when I got tired, I would get short-tempered with Molly. Then I would feel guilty about the kind of mother I was, and then a homesick feeling would set in. Ted helped protect me from the “whip lady” who lived inside me, who was always telling me I should be a better mother, should work harder, should have more energy. He believed I was doing okay with Molly and with my job, too. His opinion meant a lot to me.
I had long since confessed to him that I was a secretary, but he liked to hear about my job and told me he thought my work was important. My story about making heart valves had become a joke between us; every Sunday night Ted would say, “Well, you’d better get to sleep early so you’ll be rested up for making those heart valves tomorrow.”
Talking and eating and taking care of Molly and sleeping together all flowed along so effortlessly that we had become a family. Ted planned special outings that he knew would be fun for Molly—trips to Green Lake to feed bread to the ducks, or visits to the zoo. As we walked along, Molly would grab both of our hands and shout, “Swing me! Swing me!” I seemed to get tired of this much quicker than Ted or Molly, bu
t when I wouldn’t play anymore, they didn’t care. Ted would swing her by an arm and a leg until they were both dizzy. At home, the two of them would get into tickle fights on the floor. Molly would holler, “Save me, Mom, save me!” and then we’d all roll around on the floor, laughing and tickling until someone, usually me, would call for a truce.
On Saturday mornings, Molly and Ted would watch cartoons together and let me sleep in. Their favorite was Dudley Doright and the Mounties. Dudley had a girlfriend named Nell whom he saved from villains who routinely tied her to railroad tracks. Ted could mimic Dudley perfectly, and he would call Molly “Nell.” Together, “Dudley and Nell” would fix breakfast and bring it to me in bed.
One weeknight in November, Ted took us to dinner at his parents’ house in Tacoma. He had told me that Tacoma was a boring, ugly town. I didn’t think it looked bad, but the smell got to me—a smell of rotten eggs that I first noticed ten full miles north of town. Ted said it came from a pulp mill and was known locally as “The Tacoma Aroma.”
I was nervous about meeting Ted’s folks. I was sure that being divorced and having a child were two strikes against me, and I expected them to be wealthy. But they lived in a warm and homey two-story colonial house, to which they had recently moved. Ted had grown up in a house that he hated because his room in the basement had never been finished and it embarrassed him to bring friends home, he said. I met his four younger brothers and sisters, who all still lived at home, and I hit it off with his father.
Johnnie Bundy was a cook at an army hospital. He was from the Ozarks, and he was full of long stories about scrambling eggs for five hundred people and about cars that broke down. He talked a blue streak in a southern accent, and I was happy to listen. He was open and friendly, and he made me feel welcome.
Louise, Ted’s mother, was a secretary at their Methodist Church. She was friendly, too, but in a more formal way. Ted assured me on the way home that they had liked Molly and me.
“As much as they liked Susan?” I asked. The memory of his slender, pretty, intelligent, wealthy ex-girlfriend was still with me.
“They probably liked you more,” he said laughing.
I realized now that my family was more affluent than Ted’s. His finances were the same as most of the students I knew: He was broke most of the time. Not long after our deluxe weekend in Vancouver, Ted took me to dinner at an expensive restaurant overlooking Puget Sound. Later, he confessed that he had spent his last dollar on that meal, and that we would have had to wash dishes if I had ordered another drink. We laughed about it, and I was all the more flattered that he had taken me there. Even on the night we met in the Sandpiper Tavern, he finally confessed, the reason he was sitting at the table looking so dejected was that he had run out of money for beer.
Yet neither of us doubted that wealth was in Ted’s future. He was marked for success. I was perfectly happy to go places with him in my car, to pay for the gas, and to pay for the food he ate at my house. I was sure it would all even out eventually.
Molly and I were planning to fly home to Utah to spend Christmas with my folks. A couple of Angie’s friends were driving to Utah for the holidays, and it didn’t take much to persuade Ted to go with them. They had trouble getting through the snowbound mountain passes, and when they pulled up at my parents’ house late on Christmas Eve, Mom and Dad had gone to bed. It was cold and clear, and the ground was covered with snow. Ted couldn’t believe how clear the sky was and how many stars there were. We rolled in the snow and washed each other’s faces in it. I showed him my old bedroom where Molly and I would be sleeping, and the guest room where he would sleep. We snickered about what saints we were pretending to be. I wouldn’t dream of telling my parents about our sleeping arrangements in Seattle.
When Ted met my parents in the morning, he liked them, and they liked him. He talked politics and football with my dad. I always thought of my dad as quiet and reserved, but he and Ted talked on for hours. My mom never lets anyone help in the kitchen, so Ted didn’t ask to help—he just did. She loves to tell jokes, and Ted was the perfect audience. The two of them laughed and cooked Christmas dinner together and kept the rest of us out of the kitchen. Later, we all went out together to visit family friends, and Ted seemed to fit in wherever he went. It was a relief to me to be with him and let him carry the conversation. Late in the day, he called his family in Tacoma to wish them a Merry Christmas.
My folks were pleased with Ted, my mother’s only criticism being that she thought he was too hard on Molly; but she was a grandmother and even I thought she spoiled Molly sometimes.
Mom and Dad wanted to keep Molly for an extra week, and she couldn’t have been more excited. Ted drove back with Angie’s friends, and the next day I flew back to Seattle alone to find the dreariest of the gray winter rain. But Ted came over that night and the weather didn’t matter at all.
Ted and I had a week alone to spend any way we wanted. For the first time, we could spend nights at his place. I liked being there, surrounded by his things. I laughed at the Styrofoam, imitation-straw souvenir hat he kept from the 1968 Rockefeller campaign, but Ted was proud of it. He had gone to the Republican Convention in Miami to support Rockefeller. All that hoopla might look silly from the outside, he said, but he found himself caught up in the excitement of the convention.
Conservative as he was, Ted was sympathetic to some of the student demonstrations on campus. He was against the war in Vietnam and critical of the university as an institution. The campus was in constant turmoil in those days. Ted came to my office one day, out of breath, to tell me that Thompson Hall had been occupied by protesters who alleged that the building was the center of CIA activity on campus. We went out to watch. The police had put up barricades across the street, and the whole scene was unreal, like a movie set.
“They haven’t trashed anything,” Ted said. “They pulled it off; they’ve got the building, and it was completely nonviolent.”
This was a long way from Ogden. I didn’t even know what “trashed” meant.
But as sophisticated as Ted was, he had one hangup that surprised me. Not long after we started spending time together, he came over one night and said he had something very important to tell me, something that might change my opinion of him. Shaking with nervousness, he told me that he was illegitimate. His mother gave birth to him in a home for unwed mothers in the East, he said, and they moved to Tacoma to live with relatives when he was very small. Then she married Johnnie Bundy and had four more children. Johnnie Bundy had adopted him, but Ted knew nothing about it until he was a teenager.
It had come as a terrible shock. A cousin had been teasing him about it, and Ted had refused to believe it. The cousin had taken Ted up to the attic and showed him proof: his birth certificate. Ted was upset by his cousin’s cruelty and furious with his mother because she had left him unprepared for humiliation at the hands of his cousin. “She never even had the decency to tell me herself,” he said bitterly. He asked if I thought he should confront his mother about it.
I told him no. I could sympathize with her. She had made a mistake when she was young, as I had, but had overcome it and had gone on to make a life for herself. It could not have been easy that many years ago—harder, I was sure, than it was for me when I was pregnant with Molly. “I’m sure it’s a source of a lot of pain for her,” I said, “and that’s probably why she didn’t talk about it. It’s not important anymore. What’s important is that you’ve got a lot going for you. I love you because you’re wonderful.”
Ted put his head in his hands and cried.
It bothered him that his family was middle class. He was ambitious and wanted to be better than that. He liked the fact that my father was a successful doctor. But to me, at least, his family’s status didn’t seem to be a major problem; Ted was very fond of them, and success would be all the more satisfying to him if he made it on his own.
Our more immediate concern was apartment hunting. Ted thought my apartment was unsafe, bad for Mol
ly, and much too small, and he was right on all counts. He helped me look, and in January 1970, for not much more than I was already paying, we found a wonderful duplex in north Seattle near Green Lake and its surrounding park. It had all the luxuries I had been missing: a lawn for Molly to play on, a washer and dryer, a second bedroom, big closets, and a kitchen you could turn around in. Ted negotiated with my old landlord and got my deposit returned, even though I had not stayed for the six months minimum I had agreed to.
The Green Lake place was like heaven. As the weather got warmer, we carried our table outside for dinner once in a while, and Ted would pick flowers for the table and light candles in the dusk. We fell into a new routine: Ted kept his room in the University District, but he spent most nights with us. He drove Molly to daycare and me to work every morning and kept the car during the day. The closet filled up with his clothes.
I had never been so happy, but it bothered me to be practically living with a man I wasn’t married to. I wasn’t sure anymore what Molly understood, but when we went places together, people often assumed that Ted was her father. Ted and I had been talking about our future together almost since we met, how when we were rich, we would drive a Mercedes and buy a beach place on Puget Sound. We talked about when we were married, but we never actually talked about getting married. I figured now was the time. We were playing house and enjoying it. Why not make it legal and honest? I didn’t like not being able to be open with my parents about the exact nature of my relationship with Ted, and I felt that it wasn’t fair to Molly to have this man around who wasn’t really her dad. There wasn’t even a word for what he was in relation to us.
When I talked about him to others, I never knew what to call him. Boyfriend seemed to be too high school. Lover was true but not socially acceptable. I wanted to be able to refer to my husband, Ted. When I talked with him about it, he agreed that now was the time to do it. If he was reluctant in any way, he didn’t show it. One day in February, I took time off from work to get the license and Angie met us at the courthouse on her lunch hour to be our witness. She also loaned us five dollars for the license.
The Phantom Prince Page 3