My affair with Edward filled what I thought was missing in life but he was an impossible love. I knew he would leave me and never understood his infatuation. I wasn’t his peer. How could he be in love with me? He didn’t fit my Tropicana Village upbringing, dysfunctional family and swing shift world. His studying at Stanford to be a doctor and I working swing shift as a wafer fab aligner said it all. In addition, I was married and the mother of 2 children. Even if single, without children, he would eventually be claimed by his own and leave me, abandoned.
I accepted our relationship was temporary, kept him in the present tense and didn't dwell on the eventual end. He was a love cul-de-sac. My main road remained family. Edward's was his career and a future family, without me. I had to keep it all in perspective and not veer off the main road and crash.
Even though I thought of him constantly our physical time together was limited. Most of my time outside work remained with family. Edward's hospital internship was six nights a week from 6 PM to 6 AM. Once home he slept until noon. With studies, he was more time stressed than me. My swing shift schedule was return home at 2:30 AM, sleep until 6:30, fix breakfast, get kids off to school, clean house, pick up the youngest at 1:30, greet the oldest when he came home at 2:30, prepare family dinner then rush to work at 5:30 with my share of the dinner in my lunch bag.
Weekends flew by as a blur of backed up domestic chores and catch up sleep. Edward and I only spent the night together on Friday’s from at most 6:30 PM to 5:30 AM, less than 12 hours and often we missed a Friday. I stopped by his apartment for "nooners", typically twice a week, on the “T”s, Tuesday and Thursday for 2 hours. Total physical time together was only 4 to 15 hours a week versus physical hubby time of over 70 hours.
Once Edward attempted to introduce me to his world. He took me to a formal medical award occasion and bought me a black gown and a real pearl necklace. I ended up as ill at ease as Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman at the Polo Turf Club. Those at the soiree were academics and doctors. He spent his time talking to them. I was on my own after a few introductions. Maladroit, I kept my mouth shut, nodded agreement to what was said and smiled. I talked about the table floral arrangements to have a conversation without sounding stupid when cornered yet knew I appeared gauche doing so.
A few women commented how lovely I looked. I knew they were fishing to know who this uneducated Asian girl, wearing a wedding ring was and how she had enchanted Edward. I didn’t relax until we left. Asked if I had a good time, I said it was lovely, which it was, but not for me. I never attended one of his formal functions again with excuses I could not get away.
While Edward stamped me as his with attire, jewelry, perfume, cosmetics, nail polish and sex games it never entered my mind to leave my husband. My wedding ring was my statement. I was married and I kept this emblem always on as my announcement of it. It bothered Edward but the reality was I was married and there was a betrayal line I couldn’t cross. I’d never leave my husband even if Edward asked me to marry him despite our differences and my having kids. That is what I told myself. The reality was he never hinted, inferred or asked me to marry him.
While he was on my mind all the time, I tried to concentrate on family when with them. Edward’s image in my mind occurred most often while working as I aligned silicon wafers on the microscope.
As I peered down he would be with me and I would carry on imaginary conversations in which I was as sophisticated in knowledge and acerbic in wit as he was.
I knew Edward would leave me and he did. I wanted but never expected him to be faithful but he was for what I knew. There was never evidence of another woman in the almost two years we were lovers. If there was another I would have left him. I would not have been able to accept another in his apartment let alone bed, they like he, were mine.
In the spring of 1977 he accepted a hospital research assignment on the East Coast when his internship ended. He said I could follow but it was just words. He knew I wasn’t abandoning my family. It was time for him to start his, not an instant one with another's kids.
I asked if he wanted the jewelry back which upset him. I apologized but then he wanted the panties saying he did not want another man to see me in them. It was weird but I brought them to him and he put them all in plastic bags. I don’t know what he did with them. Maybe he took them with him.
Taking my husband to buy new ones he selected was my notification, if there was another, he was gone.
Edward had a big going away party at his apartment. I didn’t go. I didn’t want to see it stripped of the things remembered while others trampled our private place. Seeing it without the fish tank, water bed, with empty cupboards and refrigerator, cleaned but abandoned stove where I prepared meals would be too much. I didn’t know nor ask what happened to the fish tank. I was afraid he had given it to a friend.
I told him I had never seen another in our sanctuary and did not want to see it now filled with strangers. That is what I said but instead knew I would be socially ill at ease among his peers and would break down and cry. I did not want to be stared at, the uneducated woman he was oddly fixated about. He too was relieved I opted out, a sign he was returning to his own.
Instead I saw him off at the San Francisco Airport, arranged so we were alone when I picked him up outside his apartment. He carried only 2 bags. Everything else was packed and shipped, including his Porsche. Unlike before we said little as I drove, parked the car, we walked to the ticket counter, he checked his baggage and we proceeded to the gate holding hands.
There were no security checks then; one went to the gate to see a passenger off. I had a jeweler make a gold necklace with a little fish and gave it to him as we sat and waited at the gate, an hour early. He surprised me and gave me a little gold frog. We fondled our gifts in silence waiting for the time of call. There was nothing to say. It was over. We were facing the opposite arms of the Y from when we met.
We held hands when the rest of the passengers boarded as the boarding calls came. At the last call, it was time; we stood up, kissed, I wiped tears from my eyes; he picked up his carryon bag, went to the gate, turned in front of the agent and told me to remember him as he would me. The agent took his ticket, once past the door he turned again, blew a kiss and was shooed into the aluminum tube which took him away forever. The door closed, was sealed shut and he was out of my life. He met me a 25-year old girl in a shoe store and left me a 27-year old woman, alone at the San Francisco airport where hubby and I once watched passengers for excitement.
I cried as I waited for the plane to back up. I cried as I saw it taxi on the runway. I cried as it zoomed to gain speed, arched up into the sky and disappeared. I cried on the drive home.
He called when settled in. We kept a short period of telephone communication. He was still time stressed in his new position which explained his curt and aloof conversations. Once engaged in his career, however, it was not long before he met and married, an Asian woman, a Philippine nurse. He told me about meeting her but soon called no more. It was over. I was past tense. I stared at my fish tank and thought of him, my prince guppy. Not long after he married the little frog in the fish tank disappeared. I searched everywhere but never found it. I gave the fish tank sans frog but with guppies to a girl at work.
I could not drive near his former apartment. I played the song "Don't Leave Me This Way" by Thelma Houston over and over until I could say the lyrics by heart.
Family demands, however, pulled me back to my domestic world. To forget, I worked at being the best wife and mom. Still, once in a while when alone I took my gold frog keepsake from its hiding place and stared at it in my hand. It ensured my memories were real. It comforted me of how fortunate I had been to know him. He was still there in memories. Reassured, I put it back in its hiding place.
I still have the gold frog and am looking at it now.
I’m crying listening to "Don't Leave Me This Way" as I look at my reflection in the mirror with the glow of bee's wax candle light. I feel so alone.
The candle flickers, the frog and music frame my poignant memories. I smell again a redwood, eucalyptus and hibiscus evening's aromas surrounding an apartment complex pool, long gone. I mentally retrace the steps of that first evening which changed me. The door stands before my memory as I cross the threshold again. The night I became a woman I will always remember but wonder if subsequent affairs were just repeated attempts to cross the threshold again.
I never forgot him, my prince. I followed his career. He became recognized luminary in cancer research. I hoped he occasionally thought of me and snooped enough to find out he started a family. Once the internet developed I found his email address through the hospital and sent him a note wishing him the best on his birthday. He didn’t reply. I suspected he wouldn't but it still hurt. Chastened, I never emailed again.
I began to wonder if I was only his Asian fetish.
Author Notes: After the affair she is lonely without the excitement but begins to realize Edward never loved her.
United States • 74 years old