It wasn’t exactly my idea,
that trip to Dulles Airport on a rainy fall evening.
Merilee invited it. Supplied the schedule.
Wanted Ben to find a friend in Washington—some collegial ally– while she wrestled with snow and school in Fairbanks .
So much could have gone wrong:
A traffic jam, an early arrival, Ben lost in a sea of disembarking heads or in a tide of my own fear and indecision. I’d never been that bold—that reckless before.
Forty years and my come-hither words blur.
Some simple “would you like a ride home.”
And then the flicker of what would happen next as Ben asked me to pull my turquoise, geriatric Dodge Dart to the curb a block before his Falls Church house and the wife he was divorcing.
Ever since, if I choose to explain my choice in public, I just say, “it was the seventies.”
True, but somewhere in there, I’d decided that I was worthy.
I had found confidence and impatience; alongside enchantment with a man whose skill and bearing and mind raised goosebumps on my heart.
The Washington cliché of power as aphrodisiac. And a willingness never to worry about what happened when Ben traveled West.
We shared weekend beds, his sterile 1970s apartment or my parquet floors and Pennsylvania auction furniture.
And the ebb and flow of our work over sweet ceremonies of cocktails and cooking. We mastered Crockpot dishes. Tried oysters and lobsters and turkeys we’d just met in the butcher’s backyard.
We reveled in opera and gospel, piano and trumpet, the throb of Scottish military tattoos and evening Marine Parades on hot D.C. nights.
We knew the exquisite lust of elegant afternoon picnics and the privacy of dark at Arlington Cemetery and Wolf Trap.
We celebrated Christmas on the Blue Ridge and Faust in New York.
We read aloud to each other on winter evenings.
I could make a perfect Manhattan and a decent martini.
I felt beautiful—yes even the plain Kansas girl– in my sophisticated jersey gown and summer gypsy dresses.
We talked each other through preservation rules and stubborn park superintendents who trashed historic sites.
I watched Ben write and research, prepare speeches, negotiate contracts. I edited, knew Elizabeth Custer as well any Indian Wars devotee.
We took our romance to Interior parties.
Ben trusted me to speak at conferences and training sessions and wrung his hands over my quiet typewriter—believing I could write.
Five years later Ben chose Merilee—a decision, I like to think reached in a brew of gratitude, guilt, obligation, and attraction to something more exotic than the Kansas girl, however competent and comely I felt myself to be. Or maybe a choice made that half decade before with me as gullible patsy, truly a quiet diversion meant to keep Ben’s eyes from flashier prospects.
There, at the edge of the seventies and my professional competence, I wasn’t willing to relinquish Ben gracefully or predictably.
I showed them. I chose Montana.
And clung to the tattered gauzy suspicion that they would never quite live as blissfully as they foresaw.* ©
*Names altered, of course, to protect the guilty.
