When I wrote the blog post that I published last time, about the best friend, Doyle, I received a number of interesting responses. “Self-destructive” is about the nicest. One of my friends said that he’d never had a best friend that strange. True enough, when I wrote the post, I found myself becoming more ambivalent than nostalgic about Doyle.
He wasn’t very nice to me. He included me as someone who would support what he was up to because I was pliable. It’s true that he introduced me to uninhibited fun: pot, beer, basketball during a thunderstorm followed by shots of Stoli, skinny dipping in forbidden pools with girls. It was the sort of time that introduced me, at 21 with an MFA, to what my 20’s ought to be like. My 20’s would never have been as much fun without his instruction.
As we all know, my 30’s and beyond introduced me to the law, anxiety, and depression that at one point had me sobbing on a sofa for three hours. I was miserable till just about a year ago, and I’m grateful for the fun that I had because of him. It wasn’t his fault that I went to law school.
But I have trouble when I remember his first wife. As I was writing the post about him, I Googled her, and I was stunned and upset to learn that she had died a couple of years ago of multiple myeloma. This post is going to be my eulogy to her.
I met Linda in the summer after I had graduated with my MFA and was teaching at Jefferson College, a little proprietary school in downtown Greensboro (please look back and read the post “Long Live Jefferson College”, dated November 7, 2019—it’s one of my favorites, and few have visited it). Across the street from my apartment, there were a couple of girls—Linda and Debbie—whom I met somehow, now lost in the mists of 1976.
I started hanging out with them and the people who frequented their railroad apartment. Parties were frequent; I never stopped to ask what had kept them in town for the summer. In those unintentional days, I seldom stopped to ask about anything. I don’t recall anything about the others who would show up. Debbie was a petite girl to whom I’d taken a liking; she’d had brain surgery earlier and was brave and funny about it.
Linda was taller, and her German last name explained her face, blue eyes, and blonde hair. As I got to know the two of them, I liked Linda better. She was very quick, funny, and quirky; she was getting a BFA in fine arts. UNC-Greensboro was, back then, the arts campus of the UNC system, and offered my MFA in creative writing program along with programs in art, music, dance, and drama. So she had an eye.
One night, with maybe too many beers in me, I pulled Linda into a closet and kissed her. She looked astonished, so I kissed her again.
As coincidence would have it, I introduced her to Boyle the next day, and they took to each other. As I detailed in the previous post, they eventually married. I was pretty sorry. I didn’t see much of Linda at the wedding; I was involved with Doyle and his friends. I was in the wedding party, I think; I had to rent a tuxedo, but I have no memory of the ceremony. Doyle treated the entire event like a party for his friends, and the mother-in-law was not happy. I don’t recall Linda’s reactions.
But these things happen in your 20’s, and I’m told to have no regrets about what I did when I was young. I moved on. I visited them a few times over the years. Doyle took a job selling ads for a Greensboro newspaper, which couldn’t have paid a lot. Linda was finishing her BFA.
I remember driving the eight hours from Auburn where I was teaching to Greensboro to see them. Once, during a hot sleepy summer in South Carolina on I-95, I remember thinking, I’ll just take a little nap here, it’ll be all right. On another trip, I packed cold cans of Coke to press against my forehead.
I remember stopping before arriving at their house to buy beer. Linda reproached me gently; “We’ll buy your beer for you, Rach,” she said, using Doyle’s nickname for me.
I remember more clearly visiting them in Louisville, Kentucky, when Doyle had taken a job there. Things weren’t going so well by then. They had had a little girl, Catherine Emma, who was a toddler. Doyle was an attentive father. Later in life, with another wife, he had other kids, and he confided decades later, “You just have to give them unconditional love.”
When I arrived the first day, Linda and I were alone. I remember one moment clearly. She noticed, “Look how the light strikes the carpet there. The olive is much brighter.”
I said, “Oh, I wouldn’t have noticed. You’re right. I never thought about shades of olive.”
She stared at the carpet and then said, “That’s the kind of thing that when I say it he just ignores me.”
I didn’t know what to say. I always felt precarity with her; I had kissed her in a closet, after all. She had married someone else. But I sensed a moment of intimacy.
Later during that visit, she confided, “Virginia’s getting quite a workout lately.” All I could respond was “Oh.” I inferred from what she said that Doyle had gone through a period not been much interested in sex but now had had his affections restored. Doyle had confessed to me once without much regret that he was an unselfish lover.
I left them and drove back to Auburn for my final year of teaching. The next year I moved to Chapel Hill for law school. In the meantime, they had moved back to Lexington, I assume but don’t recall for his job with a newspaper. My memory isn’t clear after 35 years, but I think things ended between them pretty quickly. Doyle mentioned kissing some woman under a desk.
It wasn’t long before Linda’s parents drove up from Kinston, NC, with a trailer and packed her stuff up and took her and Catherine Emma home. I felt sorry for her. She had trusted him, and he had failed her miserably, just as her mother probably predicted. Now Linda was having to move home with her parents with a daughter to face certain judgment. Maybe her mother was actually relieved; Linda could start a new life.
To my everlasting regret, I never got in touch with Linda. I figured that she would assume that I would have taken Doyle’s side in their split, when that wasn’t true at all. I also assumed that she wouldn’t believe me if I said so. What a dummy I was.
I also pictured her living this sad, second-hand life at home in Kinston with her daughter, struggling financially, with few friends. Would she remarry? I had no idea what the dating situation was like in Kinston. Maybe after Doyle she wasn’t interested.
But then I read her obituary. She lived a happy and very involved life. She took a degree in computer programming from East Carolina and worked in that field. She volunteered in the Unitarian Church and was the tutorial coordinator at the local community college. She served on the board of the North Carolina Watercolor Society.
She lived in a waterfront condo in New Bern, North Carolina, perhaps 40 minutes from both her parents in Kinston and the shore. She seems to have lived a more complete, fun, engaged life than Doyle has. I can’t feel sorry for her. She made a very pleasant life for herself and raised Cate, who now is a designer. She inherited her mother’s artistic eye.
This is selfish of me, but I still feel a pang of regret that I didn’t get in touch. And now I never can. You never knew that I blamed Doyle.
This is also what growing old is, coming to terms with regrets. I’m so sorry, Linda, that I introduced you to Boyle and didn’t understand him better to warn you off. But you made an enjoyable and productive life for yourself; you were brave, and you deserved the pleasant life you seem to have forged for yourself.
When Doyle determined to marry you back in 1976, he said that he couldn’t let you get away. But he did. I suspect you had a better life for it, my funny, smart, brave Linda.
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