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February 14, 2002
Dear Karen:
In your beautiful Valentine you asked about falling in love.
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This doesn’t conform to the format of your questionnaire, but it’s an interesting, and true, story.
I fell in love with Cheryl the first time I saw her. It was September, 1979, and she was standing outside an elevator on the second floor of Gund Hall the first day of our orientation at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. She was one of the nine members of my class, an exclusive group of early career professionals who had decided to obtain a second professional degree in architecture. She was the only female. Tall, thin and dark, she had a perfect complexion on an oval face that was framed by long dark brown hair that fell to her shoulders. I thought she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen – at least in person. I must have stared. I had never been much of a ladies man, and I wasn’t really shy. I just couldn’t believe it. Not only had God granted me the good fortune to be accepted at Harvard, he had provided me this beautiful classmate. She was friendly and outgoing and confident and smart and she seemed to like me.
The only problem was that I was married.
It wasn’t a bad marriage, but after more than nine years it was getting a little worn around the edges. My wife had been my high school sweetheart and we had worked through our twenties, saving enough money to pay my way through graduate school at Harvard without needing any financial aid. This was a prominent factor in the arguments her attorney presented during our divorce settlement, but that is getting ahead of the story.
The intensity of the experience at Harvard forced us nine to become fast friends. We attended classes, studied, and with our significant others, socialized together. We needed each other for support, so we all got to know each other pretty well. That was fine for me. Cheryl got to know my wife and I got to spend time around Cheryl. I was able to be an arm’s length admirer, and the vicarious pleasures of her companionship were good enough for me.
It was clear as the first year of graduate school progressed that Cheryl was developing an attraction for an English man who had associated himself with the nine of us. Patrick was his name and he was dark and handsome with an impish smile. Patrick was at Harvard on loan from Cambridge University as the result of a special fellowship, so he enjoyed a special status at Harvard. This set up an interesting dynamic.
The majority of the students at the Graduate School of Design were there for a three and one half year term after graduating from a four year undergraduate college with a Bachelor of Arts or a Bachelor of Science degree. Those of us in the second professional degree program had five-year Bachelor of Architecture degrees and we were only there for three semesters (one and one half years). We had to write a thesis that required seminars and preparatory classes that the three and one half year students did not have to take. We had a sort of special status as well.
Patrick initially fell in with us because of this commonality, but he was charming and humorous so we all quickly warmed to him. Cheryl, in particular, was smitten. She looked at Patrick with eyes as big as saucers. I had mixed feelings about this, but at that point I had no desire to end my marriage. I thought the natural course of things would draw her away from me and permit me to conduct my life as I had programmed it ten years before.
For some reason, though, Cheryl and I genuinely liked each other and our friendship blossomed. She was a person who thought like I did about almost everything we talked about. We could finish each other’s sentences - we saw almost everything the same way. Of course my wife noticed this and commented upon it, but I passed it off because Cheryl was dating Patrick and I was married – nothing serious could develop. I excused our similarity of view as a coincidence of our education. Architects are taught to see the world through a relatively narrow lens, and it was easy to believe that Cheryl and I, along with our seven classmates and Patrick, simply liked each other because we looked at life the same way.
When I went to graduate school I was twenty-nine years old and reasonably set in my ways. I had been working for six years and I had obtained registration as an architect. I understood how to budget my time and how to manage the tasks I had to complete. So the prospect of an all-nighter and the scourge of the sleep derived subsequent day so common to the undergraduate collegian was anathema to me. I was too old and too mature to subject myself to that. That notion lasted until the first design studio at Harvard, which occurred in my second semester there.
The studio was working on the design of a library at Tufts University. The night before the final presentation I stayed up all night. The day of the presentation, which happened to be my thirtieth birthday, I was exhausted and unable to properly present and defend my design solution. The design jurors ridiculed it, and I emerged from the design review a beaten man. Sullen, depressed and barely to stay awake, I staggered out the front door of Gund Hall, only to encounter Cheryl. She told me that one of our classmates was having a group over for a few drinks and asked if I would like to join them to relax after the presentation. I would have followed her anywhere.
Instead I followed her to our classmate’s apartment. When we walked in twenty people, including my wife, jumped out and yelled, “Surprise!” On the coffee table there was a cake in the shape of the building that the design jury had just lambasted. It was the last thing I wanted to see, but someone told me that Cheryl had baked it. I had designed a fence around the perimeter of the building that Cheryl had rendered with pins and thread. The design that evening looked terribly ugly, but it was the most beautiful cake I had ever seen.
Things were getting serious.
The summer of 1980 arrived and we had completed our first year of graduate school. I had planned a European vacation – I had never been out of the United States and I desperately wanted to go - but I needed to find a job before I left. I had spread resumes around Cambridge for days, but I had no takers. Cheryl called on Thursday afternoon and said she had an announcement to make and couldn’t we (my wife and I) come to the Blue Parrot that evening for a drink? Ever accommodating, I accepted and when we got there Cheryl announced that she had gotten a job at an architectural office in Cambridge and she would be starting there in mid-June. I had been to the same office that day and hadn’t even gotten an interview. Spurred by competitive jealousy, I waited three hours the next morning to talk to the president of the company. I finally saw him and got a job. I left for Europe the next day. When I came back I happily found myself working in the same office as Cheryl.
We started our theses in the fall. We worked on them into and through the winter, while we both continued to work part-time at the architectural office. Patrick, meanwhile, was about to be deported. His student visa had expired. Cheryl went so far as to enlist the aid of the 11th congressional district to keep him in America, but the system won out and Patrick was forced to go back to England. I felt something between relief and guilt. I knew that I was attracted to Cheryl, but I also knew that Cheryl still looked at Patrick with those saucer eyes, so I never really thought I had a chance. Besides, I was married. Their relationship deepened and Cheryl eventually decided to marry Patrick, but we remained close. On graduation day at Harvard in June, 1981, I introduced my family to Cheryl. Patrick was not around because he had gone back to England. My mom asked me about that pretty dark haired girl. “She’s only a friend,” I said.
Early that summer Cheryl left for England to join Patrick. My wife and I saw her off and I thought my troubles were over. Cheryl was finally gone and I wouldn’t have to be tortured with my duplicitous feelings of betrayal any more. Then late one night about two months later we got a call from Logan Airport. Cheryl had decided that she couldn’t marry Patrick and had come back to America. Could she stay with us?
In a word, yes. She stayed at our apartment until she found a place to live. She went back to work at the architectural firm and established an arm’s length correspondence relationship with Patrick in England. She began to look for a house to buy.
I made up reasons to see her. I managed to sit near her at work. We worked on different projects but we would have lunch together. We still had that similarity of view and we became best friends. Every love song on the radio was about her. I wrote poetry to her that she would never see.
My relationship with my wife deteriorated. It finally bottomed out during the Christmas holiday of 1981. One day I looked at the woman to whom I had been married for more than ten years and realized I didn’t think she was attractive any more. We were definitely headed for trouble.
Cheryl looked at houses for months - scores of them. She dragged me with her. She talked my wife and I into looking for a house to buy with her. Meanwhile, she maintained her correspondence relationship with Patrick. He decided to come back over to the United States in March, 1982 to convince her once and for all that they were meant for each other. By this time I was pretty convinced that the only two who were meant for each other were Cheryl and me. I just needed to find a way to get past all the obstacles.
The day Patrick arrived in the United States was the day Cheryl finally closed a deal on a house. It was her declaration of independence from him. The poor guy never knew what happened. One obstacle was out of the way.
I found excuses to be with her. I would convince her to go listen to music or go dancing together, using the flimsy justification that my wife had to work or study. We danced to "Tainted Love" and "Waiting On A Friend" and the songs spoke to us. One night we went to a nightclub and won a dance contest for which we given a tee shirt as a prize. We rode home on the train and I realized I could not walk into my apartment with a tee shirt I had won dancing with another woman. I threw the tee shirt to Cheryl as I got off the train at the stop before her. She smiled, and although she denies it to this day, she looked at me with those saucer eyes.
It was only a matter of time before the party at Kelly’s loft on Memorial Day eve of 1982. It was a raw day in Boston as my wife and I dragged off for the party. The decision to go to a place where I knew Cheryl would be was not easy. I was a married man in love with another woman. It was the last thing my wife and I would do together without a lawyer present.
Cheryl was there, of course, looking wonderful. It took about ten minutes to decide I was leaving with her, and thirty minutes more to convince her to go with me. We walked out of the party without so much as a goodbye to anyone and walked from downtown Boston to Cheryl’s house in Somerville. On the way we stopped at Rindge Latin High School and kissed each other for the first time. I told her I loved her and she said she loved me too. I had been waiting for that moment for two and one half years. We haven’t been apart for a significant amount of time since.
It was pretty messy with my wife and all those people at the loft. She had to go home alone and no one knew where Cheryl and I were and there were all kinds of hard feelings and recriminations that neither of us have lived down to this day. There was a very nasty phone call between my wife and Cheryl that night that almost tore the whole thing apart. What I did at that party was the worst thing I have done to another person in my life. I betrayed my wife and she deserved better. She was (and still is, I am sure) a very good person who had never done anything to hurt me and I am sorry for the way I treated her.
But I have never regretted for a second that roll of the dice with the pretty dark haired woman.
If you ask her, however, Cheryl will tell you that she was not totally convinced of her love for me until later. The record will show that it rained the whole night before Memorial Day in Boston in 1982. Cheryl and I spent that night on the third floor of her house in each other’s arms. When we woke up the plumbing in the basement of her house was clogged up. Raw sewage had backed up into the stationary sinks. It was quickly edging to the top of the sink where it would have overflowed onto the floor. Something had to be done quickly. I grabbed a hose, started the suction for a siphon, and drained the sink into a bucket, quickly rinsing my mouth out with a swig of vodka. Cheryl has said many times since that any man who would suck raw sewage for her was a man she could marry. So she did.
We
have been together now for almost twenty years. She is still my best friend and my soul mate.
Her Valentines Day card to me this year said on the cover, “At first I
wanted you for my friend.” You open it up and it says “Then I thought, the Hell with
my friend, I want you for myself.”
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She’s got me.
Show this to Bruce, then feel free to use it in any way you see fit. Just change the names to protect the guilty. The book is a great idea.
Take care.