CATEGORY: CENTRAL OREGON
PHOTO:
1) ZACH AND ME
2) ZACH’S FIRST VALENTINE TO ME

1963 was my year of being insane.  It was my year of being totally, completely, madly in love.  I had never been in love before.  Nor, in that beyond-abandoned way, have I ever been again.

Zach, the object of my insanity was 7 years younger than I, but about 70 years older in experience and sophistication.  He had all the charm of a unique personality, combined with a dazzling worldliness that only money could buy.  He had graduated from Princeton with a degree in architecture.  He had lived in Paris.  He could speak French.  He was familiar with European art and literature.  He could play the guitar.  He could play tennis.  

He did not want to be an architect; he wanted to be an artist and had decided that Bend would be the place where he could live and paint and use as home base for travel to various parts of the country.  He had decided to move to Bend by systematically checking out the amenities: right climate, good skiing, right distance from Pacific beaches.

He rented an empty store front—one huge room with a bathroom in one corner, a separate utility sink in another and a tacked on garage in back. It was on one of the side streets of Bend.  He divided the spaces with some six ft. high storage units that could be moved around for easy re-figuring. He furnished his new apartment in his own unique style.  Everything he did had that special touch of artistry and casual but elegant restraint.  His store front was both his studio and his living space.  It smelled of oil paint and turpentine.  AND, it was large enough for another of his myriad abilities: dancing.  It could accommodate a whole crowd of dancers.

He chose me in the same way he chose Bend as a place to live: by checking qualifications.  He called me.  He introduced himself.  He said he had been asking questions of the people he met–namely: who were the best female dancers in Bend?  He was having a dancing party at his new residence and wanted to invite me.  Of course I accepted his invitation.

He had learned to dance from a private instructor as a teen, but although he knew how to do all the ballroom dance steps, he had altered them and made up his own steps combining them from time to time with those he had learned. Actually, he made them up as he went along, because he never seemed to repeat himself.  My first dance with him seemed to be the most magical experience of my life up until then.  That became the second most magical experience when I danced with him the second time.  It went on like that for as long as we were together.  I never knew what steps he would take next, but I could follow him is if we were one person.  When our first dance was over, he looked at me; I looked at him.  It was with deep wonder: something beyond recognition.

After that, we were together almost constantly.  We did everything together, except our individual work.  When we weren’t together, he called me several times a day.  I had never felt so cared for.

He knew how to make the most mundane incident seem like a hay ride to the moon.  “I want to walk down this street, this sidewalk (long look into my eyes) with YOU!”  He would show up at my house when I was working, show me a BLM or Forest Service map of some remote place and talk me into going for a “boat ride.”  He did not mean in a boat.  He did not mean a fixed horse race.  He had an early model Volkswagen convertible.  He would put the top down and pull out the choke so it was going about five miles an hour on some dirt road to who-knew-where.  Then we would sit up on the back of the front sea; he would steer with his feet, and pretend it was a boat and he was the captain giving orders through a speaker tube.  If this excursion was on a Friday or Saturday night, we might go back to my house, and he would look through my clothes and pick out what dress I would wear to go dancing with him that evening.  Sometimes he would choose a certain outfit for me, like a costume, saying he would wear something matching, and we could pretend some fantastic situation–like he was a gangster and I was his mall, or we were German spies, or Parisian tango dancers.

He also liked to drink. I didn’t. I was intoxicated by just being with him: besotted, oblivious.  I could dance all night on an explosion of one 7up.  Mostly I drank plain water.  We danced at least two nights a week at a night club north of Bend.  We would start early about seven o’clock, dance to the juke box until the musicians arrived, and then dance straight through until closing time at 2:00am.  People would stand around and watch us dance and often buy us rounds of drinks–which was wasted on me, but loved by my partner.  Heady stuff!  I was so exhilarated that somehow I never felt tired the next day.  I managed to get my sewing work done, just as he managed to paint, but he didn’t have children and it was as if I didn’t have children.  I had lost all sense of balance and proportion.  I will be eternally grateful to my sister, Mary, for becoming the mother of my children for that year, because I wasn’t even there.  My feet were not on the ground.  I was dancing on a cloud floating over Shangri-La.

He was in the Naval Reserve, and would take trips to California to be in the Navy.  Then, he would write me ardent letters with illustrations of us dancing.  He would write from some exotic seaside Southern California club, with a view of Catalina Island, where he was drinking with his Navy buddies and where there was dancing.  “We are dancing and I love you”  was written around the edge of the whirling lines of him and me twirling together.

During the summer of that year, his billion dollar mother came to visit.  That is to say, he had brought her back from one of his trips, this one to New York City, where she lived.  While he had been gone I had made him a shirt of fawn colored “sheer” suede.  Sheer suede is suede that has been split into two skins through the inside of the leather so it is as light and soft as velvet.  I knew where to buy suede skins via mail from Portland.  He had a favorite shirt.  I took it apart to get the pattern so I knew his new shirt would fit perfectly.  Then I sewed the original one back together again.  The suede shirt was in a gift box hanging just above eye level, as if suspended in space, by a piece of fishing line from the ceiling of his studio when he walked in with his haughty mother.  Since he and I, despite my neglect, often did things with Eric and Jari, all three of us were there to greet them.  The shirt fit him perfectly.  He felt the softness of it around his neck.  He ran his hands down its front leaving their traces on the nap.  He was SO pleased.

Afterwards, the children commented on his mother’s persona that, like dry ice, gave off frozen mist and made the room cool in the middle of summer.  That, and a dinner party he gave for her, were the only times I saw her during her visit, but a friend of mine in whom she had confided during her visit (a graduate of and eastern college to whom “mother” deigned to have a conversation) told me that she had said, “My son has known a lot of girls, girls of very good families, and he has had a lot of fun with a lot of girls, but I have never seen him as infatuated as he is with THAT woman.”

He was the only person who ever encouraged me to go to school in architecture.  He thought I had talent.  I showed him two small cabin-like  houses I had designed for the back of my property which went down to the Deschutes River on one corner.  One was for the bluff above the river with a view of the canyon and distant fields.  It consisted of three triangles. The other was built into the canyon hillside right at the river’s edge and had earth for a roof.  It was just one room except for a small bathroom and kitchenette in the back.  The shape was a square turned 45° from parallel to the river.  It had one all-glass corner pointing toward the river.  The corner furthest from the river was truncated with the tiny bath and kitchenette back to back against it.  The back walls were of lava rock. Zach liked this one, but not the other.

Shortly after the end of one enchanted year together, he told me that I had made him realize, for the first time in his life, that he really did want to get married, but that he didn’t want to marry me. I, in my innocence, appreciated his honesty.  He said that on his last trip south, he had met someone he thought he wanted to marry.

That was the end.  I was devastated.

He married his new love.  As had he, she came from the east coast.  She had graduated from Wellesley and could speak five languages.  He stopped painting.  His mother financed his venture into business: designing and manufacturing furniture.  In a few years, he gave that up and moved back east.  But before that, a friend told me that soon after his marriage, he had started pursuing several other woman in Bend, including said friend.  It made me realize how fortunate I had been that I was not the one he wanted to marry.  I would have said yes; then I would have been the wife on whom he cheated.

Despite the sad-for-me ending, in my deepest heart, I am grateful for that wanton, mad, mad, mad experience.  Without it, my psyche would have known something was missing in the entirety of my life.

Every tiny particle of my life has been either a blessing, or a blessing in disguise. Knowing Zach was one of my great blessings.