COMING TO CONCLUSIONS

The Autobiography

Of

Peter Tristan Stuart

By

Gene C. McCoy

Book Four





Wounded
The Sub continent - Mogadishu Revisited
COMING TO CONCLUSIONS

The Autobiography of Peter Tristan Stuart

by

Gene C. McCoy

BOOK FOUR

CHAPTER 30

The following are some unedited entries from my journal that reflect how I handled my new great good fortune:

Madrid, Spain
April 25, 1977
Spain revisited.  I arrived in Madrid this morning after an
all night flight from Washington.  Claudia came to see me
off.  I was very caught up in my own thing and not really
responsive to her needs.  There was no tearful goodbye, or
display of emotions, although knowing Claudia I am sure that
she was full of tears inside.  I don't know why things did
not come to the conclusion that she wanted.  The ride in
from the airport was wonderful although the cab driver
scared the wits out of me.  Thais called and is coming by
the Hotel Wellington to have coffee with me.  (I had told
her in a letter that I would be stopping at the Wellington,
and I had given her the date.

Rome, Italy
April 28, 1977
Thais did come to the hotel looking very elegant and chic as
usual.  We walked to the Calle Serrano and had a cafe con
leche in the Bar Blanco.  She left me to go to work, and I
went across the street to the embassy to cash a check and
visit with old friends.  I then walked down the Paseo de la
Castellana to the Cafe Gijon.  It remains the same.  Luis
the cigarette vender is still there, but if Manolo the
waiter still works there I didn't see him.  Maybe Manolo
fulfilled his dream and bought that pension in Murcia.  I
met Thais later for a copa de Jerez at the Jose Luis
Restaurant on the Calle Serrano just above the embassy, and
then we went to lunch at the Argentina Restaurant.  The same
man still runs it.  The pork chops are still good, and they
still serve two kinds of potatoes with their meals.  The
visit with Thais was wonderful, but the sexual tension was
too much.  She owns a house in Calpe now, and she invited me
to spend time there.  How I would love to do that, but, My
God, I know I could not stay away from her.
Lunch in the Argentina started a flood of nostalgic
memories that made me feel very warm inside.  We then walked
to her flat where the same feelings continued.  Her flat is
a lovely place in the old part of Madrid.  It is the place I
described in "Operation Crossroads," the novel about Panama. 
We all (Thais, Jack and I) went out to the taskas on the
Calle de Cuchilleros and drank a lot of red wine.  The next
morning she came to my hotel and I suffered hot flashes and
pains in the stomach from what I believe were related to
what I wanted to do and what I should do.  Naturally, I
wanted to get in bed and make love with her, but I fought
off the temptation to do so.  By the time I got to Rome I was exhausted.
New Delhi, India
April 30, 1977
Before I get into the present,  I want to record that on
Friday morning, after Thais had come to the hotel to see me,
when we walked together down the Calle Velazquez to the
Calle de Alcala we found a bar called El Espartero.  We
stopped for a coffee and three Spaniards were sitting next
to us talking about the last Sunday's bullfight.  She had to
go to work and she left me there.  After she had gone I
walked back down the Calle de Alcala to Serrano, and then to
the Paseo de Recoletos and down to the Plaza de Cibeles.  I
then cut up Lope de Vega to the Plaza Santa Ana  How
many times have my heros in my novels made that same walk? 
I continued on to the Plaza Mayor and stopped in a cafe for
a beer.  Then I went down the steps under the Arco de
Cuchilleros to the Calle de Cuchilleros to my favorite plaza
in Madrid, the Plaza de Conde de Barajas.  Later that day
Thais and I returned there and sat together.  We talked
about the things we had done together; the joys; the pains;
we agreed that it was love that we had shared, and we also
agreed that we still loved one another  in a deeper more
sensible way.  Who in the hell wants love between men and
women to be deep and sensible.  Love between men and women
requires abandon, passion, doing crazy things without giving
a thought to the consequences.  I think I'll write a short
story about Madrid revisited.  It might grow into a novel -
flashbacks between past and present until in the end past
and present merge in love and union.  All of the old thrill
is still there.  I am loath to even think such a thing
because my writing always proves to be prophecy.  The
opening line for the story.  "Do you remember the first time
we made love together?"

New Delhi, India
May 1, 1977
The last stop before Dacca, my home for the next how many
years?  Thoughts for a poem;

At times I am like a mountain stream, swollen with waters of
melted snows, raging downward taking with me all that 
stands before.	At other times	I am as placid as a crater
lake, replenishing from secret subterranean sources that of
me that is taken up by the sky and later dropped on thirst soils
so that crops and flowers bloom to feed the masses.
I am at once both Dionysian and Appolonian.

CHAPTER 31

It was a steamy late afternoon when we started our descent into the broken clouds of a tropical storm that was moving across Dacca out of the Bay of Bengal. The Fasten Seat Belt sign came on; I looked out the plane window at the lush green rice paddies, and shacks standing on stilts or clustered on red muddy patches of land in a network of canals and lakes. We came in low over the treetops of mango and banana plantations and dropped down hard on the runway. A spray of water from the puddles left by the storm blew up around us as the pilot reversed the engines. At the end of the runway we turned, taxied back through the puddles and finally rolled to a stop on the tarmac in front of the crumbling, mildew stained airport building. When the stewardess opened the door it was like opening the door to a steam bath.

I am not an inexperienced or unseasoned traveller, but nothing I had done or seen in the past had really prepared me for the impact of Dacca. Neither Mogadishu, Lahore, Karachi or Rawalpindi had the impact upon me that I experienced as I walked off that plane into the sticky heavy air and teeming mass of humanity that awaited me in Dacca.

A crowd of skinny, half starved, half-clothed coolies dressed in lunghis, a piece of cloth wrapped around their waists, and bare and sweating from the waist up, struggled to push a baggage cart toward the plane. Another cluster of half-naked children clamored for the passengers' attention with offers to assist us through the health, customs, currency and immigration inspections. The smell of unwashed bodies and ancient toilets filled the air of the chaos infested reception room, a corrugated tin-roofed, lean-to shack on the side of the airport building.

My last act before leaving New Delhi where I had stayed in the elegant old Claridge's Hotel, a monument left over from the last days of the British Raj, had been to dress in a crisp khaki Brooks Brothers suit. I had put on a fresh blue oxford cloth shirt, and a smart red and yellow regimental striped tie so that I looked like a well travelled, seasoned Foreign Service officer on his way to take up duty at a Southeast Asian outpost. By the time I walked out of the ordeal of the health, customs, currency, immigration inspections I looked and felt like a bowl of melted jello. I had loosened my tie, removed my jacket and my shirt was ringing wet with sweat. The so called lobby was a sea of faces, bodies and waving arms, and the clamor of the singsong Bengali shrieks bounced off the high ceiling. I looked around to see someone who looked as though they might be from the American Embassy waiting to receive me. "Pete, Pete Stuart," a voice said from behind me. I turned and standing off to one side of the exit gate was a white man dressed in a khaki bush jacket; he sported a British style handlebar mustache, and a curved stem briar pipe hung from his mouth. He was one of those Americans who, after a few years on the subcontinent, take on the trappings and appearance of a Brit. They become more British than the British I was glad to see him.

I shoved my way through the crowd hovering around the exit and put out my hand when I got to his side.

"Sorry I couldn't make it inside to help you through that ordeal, but the Government just cancelled all of our airport passes," he said and offered his hand. "I'm Harley Phillips. Welcome to Dacca."

I followed him out of the airport and we climbed into the back seat of a black American Embassy sedan. The driver had turned on the air conditioning in advance of our arrival so that slipping into the cool quiet of the car was like walking into a church. I leaned back and closed my eyes. "Holy shit," I said. "What a fucking ordeal!"

The driver eased the car past a string of bicycle rickshaws and a line of three wheel scooter "baby-taxis," then turned out of the parking lot onto a dual carriageway. There were people everywhere I looked.

"You'll find that when you try and pull the levers of power in this country that they've been disconnected," Harley said. "That business about cancelling the airport passes is just an example. They make up the rules on a day-to-day basis.

"A couple of weeks ago they caught the Libyans smuggling some guns into the country in the diplomatic pouch, and the Bangladeshi solution was to start inspecting all diplomatic shipments, including ours. Naturally we objected, and the next thing we knew they had cancelled all of our airport passes."

"I know that syndrome," I replied. "It seems to be a common characteristic of developing countries. I sometimes wonder if the reason they make getting in and out of these countries so difficult isn't because they really want us to stay home."

"Oh, they want our money, but they would prefer that we make mail payments, or deposits into theira Swiss bank accounts," Harley mused.

I looked out the window of the car, and it was a sea of people, walking, standing, sitting, squatting on their haunches, riding in rickshaws, or hanging on to ancient double decker London busses. We stopped at a railroad crossing barrier and waited for a train to pass. Like the busses there were more people sitting on top of, or hanging onto the railway cars than there were inside.

"I can see why population and family planning programs are so important here," I said. "It's wall to wall people out there."

"Damn near 100 million of the poor beggars in an area the size of Wisconsin," Harley replied. "You'll get used to them though. After a while you won't even notice them. It's amazing how the human organism adapts to conditions that you think are beyond your capacity to accept. You know that. Hell you're not a newcomer to this business or the subcontinent."

"That's true," I replied. Nevertheless, I'm a little culture shocked by all of this." Harley looked out the window of the car. "We're in the Gulshon area now. This is where most of our people and the rest of the foreigners live. You know, it's a typical subcontinent diplomatic enclave. Big houses, high walls, twenty-four hour guards, and after you get settled into your house a legion of servants. A cook, a bearer, inside and outside sweepers, a mali for the garden and a chowkidar for the gate."

"Speaking of houses, what have you got in mind for me?" I asked.

"We've got several places you can look at," Harley replied, "but they're in the process of being cleaned up. We're going to put you in the Staff House for a few days. It's clean and comfortable. In fact, here we are now."

A chowkidar opened the gate to a large compound and we pulled up in front of an elegant old whitewashed two story house that was obviously a remnant from the days of the British Raj. A well manicured garden overflowed with flowers and was shaded by several large, mango trees. Beyond a neatly trimmed lawn was a swimming pool and two tennis courts.

I climbed out of the car and a smiling Bengali bearer stood waiting for me. "Welcome to Dacca, Mr. Stuart," he said in the singsong lilt that is typical of India and the subcontinent. Also characteristic of the subcontinent was the gesture of cocking his head quickly to one side as he spoke.

"This is Rashid, Pete," Harley said. "He runs the ranch, and anything you need, he'll see that you get it.

We entered the house and Rashid and the driver followed along with the bags to my bedroom. "There's a good restaurant here where you can get a decent meal, and the bar's well stocked right now. Tomorrow we'll fix you up at the commissary, but in the meantime I put a couple of bottles of Black Label and Beefeaters here in your room. You've got a little fridge for soft drinks and mix, so I think you can survive."

"More than survive, Harley," I said. "This is the best staff houses I've ever seen. Can I fix you a drink?"

"Rashid will do it. What do you want?" Harley asked.

"Gin and tonic?" I asked and looked at Rashid.

"Yes, sa'b," he replied and cocked his head.

My room was comfortably furnished with locally made cane furniture, and from the window I had a view of the garden, tennis courts and swimming pool. We sat down in the cane chairs pulled up around a coffee table and Harley took a large brown envelope out of his briefcase.

"Here's all of your arrival forms, and a couple of invitations. Tonight your having dinner with the ambassador, and tomorrow you've got a cocktail party at the AID Director's house. I'll have you over to my house for dinner the next night, and then you're on your own. You'll find the social life is incestuous but active."

* * * * * *

A lot of things had been happening in the world while I had been working and trying to keep body and soul together in Las Vegas, Central and South America, West Africa and the Middle East; separating from my children and getting a divorce from Yvette; trying to write a book; getting reappointed to the Foreign Service, and all the while struggling with creeping and progressive alcoholism. Not the least of what had been going on, without my being aware of it, was the new and emerging roles of women, in the world generally and in the Foreign Service particularly.

When I left the Foreign Service in 1972 it was pretty much a man's profession. There were a few women officers, but for the most part women occupied secretarial jobs. They still made coffee for the officers, kept our social and business calendars straight, and made excuses for us when we had long two or three martini lunches. All of that had changed by the time I arrived in Dacca.

A new kind of husband and wife officer team known as a "Tandem Couple" had appeared. Whereas a Foreign Service wife had, in the past, been a freebie for the Department of State, providing a wide range of representation functions without pay as a part of her role as a wife, now, wives of many officers were themselves Foreign Service officers. There was one tandem couple in the USAID Mission in Dacca, and not only had the wife retained her maiden name as a manifestation of her independence, she had adopted a child and given it her, or better said her father's, last name.

Another couple had swapped roles. She was the officer/employee, and he had left his job as an attorney in order to become her dependent and follow her overseas. He shopped in the commissary, played tennis during the day with all of the wives, attended the afternoon teas given by the ambassador's wife, and three times a day brought their new baby to the embassy for her to breast feed. The ambassador did not like the appearance of the latter activity, but he was afraid to complain about it for fear of a sexist complaint being filed against him. Times had certainly changed since John Kenneth Galbraith, during his tour as Ambassador to India, remarked that the State Department was the "most ornate bureaucracy since the Ming Dynasty."

I had been living in the staff house about a week when one morn ng I went into the dining room for breakfast, and Rashid placed me at a table with an attractive young woman. "Memsa'b not minding if sa'b sitting at your table," Rashid said to the woman. "Easier if one table using."

She looked up at him, and then at me. "Not at all," she replied and smiled, either at his English, or at me; maybe both.

"Good morning," I said. "My name's Pete Stuart."

"Hi, Pete," she said. "My name's Valerie Martin, but my friends call me Mystery."

I sat down in the chair opposite her. "Mystery Martin," I said. "That sounds intriguing. Why Mystery?"

"Oh, I don't know, why not?" she said. "All the world loves a mystery, and I need all the love I can get."

Mystery was a thirty-two year old pixie who had interrupted her work career to go back to the University of California, Berkeley for her PhD, and her Peace Corp Volunteer, Berkeley graduate student appearance belied a tough-minded brilliance that was well tempered with a fine sense of humor. She was in Asia doing the research and data gathering for her doctoral dissertation, and had taken time off from this work to accept a contract with the AID Mission to provide consulting services to a women's organization in Bangladesh.

Mystery knew her way around Asia in the same way that I knew my way around Latin America. She had worked in India, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, and she was proficient in several Southeast Asian languages. In many ways she was doing in Asia exactly what I had done as a student in Mexico, and she had built up a vast store of knowledge from her first-hand experience of just living and knocking around the world.

We hit it off well immediately, and after we had both spent a few days at the breakfast table together, I borrowed a car from the embassy and we did some sightseeing, such as was available in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh is a very poor country. Driving is a nightmare. The narrow, pothole filled roads and streets are always jammed with people; rickshaws and carts pulled my scrawny half-naked and half-starved coolies weave in and out, and overloaded trucks and busses careen around as though they were on a Los Angeles freeway. There are no quaint and charming country inns where one can stop for coffee or a drink, nor are there any open fields or meadows in which to walk and commune with nature. Every inch of space is taken up with rice paddies, shacks and tiny plots of ground which are cultivated to try and produce a meager subsistence level existence for the millions of people that are ever present. It did not take us long to exhaust our sightseeing energies. These activities were, anyway, only shallow covers for both of us to get well enough acquainted so that we could go to bed together, and it took us about a week.

I have been an inveterate keeper of journals for many years, and the following is an entry in my journal made at this time:

Dacca, Bangladesh
May 13, 1977
I have been in Dacca for 13 days, and, as luck would
have it, a very nice lady of some 32 years of age
arrived just after I did, and already I have been in
bed with her twice.  Also, as luck would have it, both
times I was unable to perform.  I keep thinking about
Claudia and I feel guilty.  I think I like this girl very
much, but I need to explore her sexually, and I can't. 
It's a damn vice.  There is more to it than meets the
eye, the inner eye that is.
	
Dacca, Bangladesh
May 15, 1977
Well, at last we accomplished what we wanted to do.  Orgasm!
Within a week or so Mystery moved out of the Staff House to live with some friends in the Daimondi section of Dacca and shortly thereafter I moved into the house that was to be my permanent residence for the next two years.

Daimondi was a section of town that was much different from Gulshon, the diplomatic enclave, where I ended up taking a house. Daimondi was the old part of Dacca where the houses were small, the streets narrow and open sewers made it both unhealthy and unpleasant. It was the part of town where middle class Bangladeshis lived, and the section where most of the thousands of people who worked for Private Voluntary Organizations, PVOs as they are referred to in the jargon of the development set, lived.

Following the war of independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan and the Indian intervention every PVO in the world seemed to have set up shop in Dacca. There was a whole subculture and lifestyle among the PVO workers that was separate and distinct from that of the diplomatic, government to government aid giving organizations and the expatriate business communities.

The PVO set was younger, more adventurous and idealistic. They had small parties where they sat around on the floor playing guitars, singing songs like "Blowing in the Wind," and smoked hashish and grass, both of which were legal in Bangladesh. (Cannabis is grown on government owned plantations, and sold through government outlets.)

This lifestyle was more in keeping with Mystery's Berkeley Grad Student way of living; she felt right at home with some PVO friends whom she knew from her days in Thailand, and who had drifted over to Dacca from Bangkok as money became available for the Bangladesh reconstruction and recovery effort. As a matter of fact I rather liked mixing with these people myself. They presented a relief from the more rigid and formal diplomatic community in which I lived and socialized, and it rather took me back to my own younger days as a student in Mexico, or the Italian pension experience I had on my TDY assignment in Libya.

For a while Mystery and I maintained a facade of separate living arrangements. She had her room in Daimondi with Jake and Beth, her PVO pals from Thailand, and she had access to my house in Gulshon.

I purchased a second hand Datsun Station Wagon that became known as the "Orange Bomb," because of its penchant to bomb out in a crisis. For a while Mystery would come to my place for dinner and either I took her home late at night, or she would leave early in the morning and drive the Orange Bomb to Daimondi. We had home to office transport provided by the embassy so there was no need for me to have the car.

However, all of the commuting soon became a bother. The late night drive across town became tiresome for me, and it got worse when the monsoon rains started. Driving in Dacca, at night, dodging rickshaws and people, in the middle of a torrential tropical rain storm after several martinis and a bottle of wine was more of challenge than I wanted. Getting up at dawn and driving back in the morning became more of a burden on Mystery than she wanted. Moreover, the time that was taken up in the commuting was time taken away from her work of writing her dissertation. In addition, life in Daimondi was not conducive to the privacy and solitude that is necessary to write, and Mystery complained about the constant hubbub and turmoil at Jake and Beth's place. People were always coming and going. A grass party or a wine drinking session was always in progress, and her room was right next to where the action took place. To top things off she had no air conditioning, and in the tropical heat of Dacca this is a form of torture.

I offered to let her move in to my house. She accepted only on the condition that she have a room of her own where she could be alone to concentrate on her writing. I provided her with the room, an IBM Selectric typewriter and a cook and bearer who did the laundry, house cleaning and shopping. We also worked out a deal where she could use the commissary in my name, and over the weekend of the Fourth of July she moved into my house with me.

The next few entries in my journal give an indication of what was happening to me during this time:

August 2, 1977
Dacca, Bangladesh
A thought has occurred to me.  It comes from some
place, but I don't know from whence.  For the lack of
ownership, and being such a pretty thought, I think
I'll take it for my own.  That thought is that it's
very important to love everyone you meet because once
you've planted your love in someone you go on forever
(or at least as long as they do.)  Hence, it's a way of
insuring your own immortality (mortality?).
	
August 3, 1977
Dacca, Bangladesh
During that time we lived in a house by the water.  It
looked out over a lake toward a village.  At night we
could hear the sound of flutes and drums, and in the
afternoons the voices of children skittered over the
ripples.  It was a nice house, full of love.  It was a
house where artists did their work, where people loved,
where a man and a woman loved.
August 4, 1977
Dacca, Bangladesh
I can't remember when I started throwing caution to the
wind, but there is still a lot of it to be off loaded.
August 5, 1977
Dacca, Bangladesh
Things fall into place.  I am much caught up with
extending myself.  Me an old FSO 3 dealing with the
young.  The truth of the matter is that on weekends
I am Sailing ahead of the wind In love.
Not given to thinking about 
the meaning of it all,
from whence we come or go.
Enough that we are.
August 6, 1977
Dacca, Bangladesh
A little spark of current
jumped from your soul and 
merged with mine.
From head to toe it runs
repairing a broken heart,
healing hurt feelings,
to make me whole again.

Mystery and I passed the summer together. We gave and went to a lot of parties, and spent our weekends at the tennis courts along with the rest of the expatriates who struggled with the boredom of living in Dacca. Mystery swam laps in the pool while I played tennis.

In August, Mystery completed her contract with the AID Mission, and left Dacca for the Philippines and Taiwan where she had to continue the research for her doctoral dissertation. In October she returned, and moved back into the house with me.

It was sweet to have her back with me. I had not realized how much I had come to enjoy her company during the summer, and how much I had missed her once she was gone.

In looking back over my journal I can see that I did not have many coping skills to deal with the loneliness of living a single life in Dacca. I drank far too much and I began separating myself from people. When Mystery was gone I could have spent my time writing, but I chose to drink, and be angry about becoming involved with a woman who could not stay with me. However, when she returned to Dacca all of that was forgotten, and I simply enjoyed her company. In November I asked Mystery to marry me by saying "Would you like to share your future with my past?" She accepted and in December we went together to London where we stayed in the flat in Hampstead with my friend Henri Fulton and his lady friend Barbara. It was our intention to be married in London, but once in England we learned that it would require more time to arrange for two foreigners to be married than we had available. We decided to defer the marriage, and just have a good vacation.

After almost seven months of isolation, hard work, and the monotony of living in Dacca it was wonderful to be with friends in a civilized country. We shopped for things that we needed for the house; we went to museums, the theater and had some marvelous dinner parties with Henri and Barbara.

Barbara owned a farm in Dorset, and after Christmas we all went down to the country for New Year's Eve. Mystery and I rented a car and toured the Dorset Countryside, stopping in charming little English country inns for lunch or tea and fully enjoyed the richness of culture that was available to us. The contrast of sightseeing and living in England after the months of being deprived of any familiar culture in Bangladesh was vivid. Eventually, of course, we had to return to Dacca, and shortly after that Mystery again left for Nepal to continue her research work.

After the vacation in England, returning to my solitary life in Dacca was excruciatingly painful. Mystery was by this time living in the bush in Nepal outside of Katmandu,but by June, 1978 she had again returjaed to Dacca, and when I had to go to Thailand on business, I took Mystery with me where we had a another nice vacation in Bangkok and Pataya Beach. When we returned to Dacca she launched into the writing of her dissertation. I played tennis, cooked and worked, and In the fall I took a couple of weeks of leave, and flew to Washington to do a little "corridoring" to try and work up my next assignment. If it were at all possible, I wanted to get back into the Latin American Bureau.

Bit-by-bit, letter-by-letter, word-by-word, page-by-page Mystery finished her dissertation in early November just in time for us to make a special celebration of it at the Marine Ball, the social event of the year at any Foreign Service post. We also used the occasion of the Marine Ball to formally announce our engagement with plans to be married in the Spring of the next year. Sometime after the Marine Ball Mystery wrote the following little story and gave it to me:

MUTUALLY IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES

By Valerie J. Martin

No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. - Matthew 6:24

The sun glistened on the coverlet like any Monday morning. Idly, she watched a tiny slender thread waving in some unknown breeze. The thread had a little crook at the end, much like an arrow. It reminded her of his cock, waving as it reached up in hunger toward her cunt.

It reached up hungrily this morning. But for the first time she could not respond. For the first time she felt the meaning of "It leaves me cold."

He felt it too, and was disappointed. "Well, if that's the way it is...." He reached over for his cigarettes. In a short while, he swung out of bed, put on his short blue robe, and tied it efficiently around his waist as he leaned over to grab his cup to get more coffee. The cup was empty, and he walked briskly to the kitchen for more.

When he came back, he slid under the covers and reached for her. "I need a little hugging." She moved toward him, but remembered that again for the first time, she found herself on the other side of the bed, not curled around his back in the usual comforting interlock. She had quickly moved to his side then too, but that didn't erase the event. Now the feelings did well in her, but he could feel the blockage.

"You don't love me this morning."

"That's silly. You don't love someone one day and not the next."

"But you don't love me as much as you usually do. What's wrong?"

She recalled the glow that often rested on his face when he told her how much he liked to wake up with her in the morning. The tender warmth of her sleepy smiling "I love you," verbal and unspoken. She knew what he meant because it was conspicuous by its absence.

Last night. Should she lie? No! She had not learned much in her 32 years, but she had learned that issues not faced eventually explode.

"I don't like it when you drink too much."

He groaned and rolled over.

How could he be so gentle in the mornings? she thought. This man she did l ov e. The man with whom she shared morning meditations, or evening poetry readings. The man with whom she could open the door to a world of imaginative light and sound made even more precious by the fact that they knew others could not divine this secret communication of theirs. She also knew that this same divine communication faded with the increased color of his cheeks and the slur of his words when he drank.

I know, she thought, he doesn't think it's too much. Or at least he tells himself that. Am I just being picky? But how can I ignore the changed feelings in me? I know he's feeling judged, and ordinarily I don't think I judge. But my own feelings are not a matter of calculated intellectual judgement; they are a gut reaction. The observing corner of her mind simultaneously noted how different one's perspective became as one crossed the line between speculation to intention.

"Maybe we ought to reconsider the marriage plans."

The pain in his voice was sharp. "I'm not going to change later."

Her reaction was muted panic. Let's not make a decision hastily, her downcast eyes said.

"I'll think about that over a shower," he reflected aloud as he strode to the bathroom, taking his coffee with him.

He continued, his voice fading slightly by the barrier of the wall between them. "One thing you have to learn when you live with someone is that you are constantly under their scrutiny. You can't judge them. They have to make their own decisions, and you have to accept them without reminding them of their imperfections."

A dialogue between the observer and the observed. How had he put it about love? Something about really understanding that one's own happiness is mutually dependent on the other's.

The other night they had read from T. S. Elliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: And I have known the eyes already, known them all. The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, Then how should I begin, To spit out the butt-ends of my days and ways? L And how should I presume?

The observer and the observed. They had talked about that the other night too, when they fought about her interpretation of a remark he made at the Marine Ball. When they announced their engagement. The lines of the argument were beginning to fade, but she recalled that it was something he claimed he had said to another officer in innocent pleasantries that had been misinterpreted. She felt that it offended, and he had said that it was not his problem that it was misinterpreted, that it was not understood. The truth of the matter was that he did not remember what he had said, and underlying this surface dismay was her realization that he had drunk too much. But then, everyone drank too much. It was the Marine Ball!

But then.... There was always a "but." When they first met, he had said that at home, in the U.S.A., he usually didn't drink much. She remembered how much she appreciated that. They had discussed the occupational drinking hazards of life in an overseas foreign community. The endless round of mandatory cocktail parties, the overabundance of liquor carried gently and subversively on trays by bearers decked out handsomely in their white suits, the tinkle of ice and clatter of voices stilted in cocktail talk with the people they see in and out of every day and office. Work. In the business of overseas representation and "development," work occupies most minds. The more creative people find other outlets: writing, art, yoga, or the range of physical sports - tennis, boating, swimming. But there is always the too easily-ready pit available; drinking to forget the real pressure of a hard job in a country of desperate poverty, drowning in the mud and slime of its own corrupt leadership.

The Marine Ball! Jesus, was that only Friday, two nights ago? That fight ended when he rolled out of bed to storm into the spare bedroom. She had moved more quickly, sprinting out ahead of him to bang the door shut in his face with the loud clack of the bolt shutting. A night of uneasy sleep, followed by a morning of passionate reconciliation.

He had a fine, sensitive artistic nature, appreciative of the ironies of existence, and he was harshly put to reconcile the hardships of this post. Hence the early "buts" which she could and did excuse. And this weekend the "buts" were also understandable as they related to their impending marriage. After all,there is a lot of surrendering to be done in such a commanding coupling. She was just lucky that she had weekdays of peace in which to absorb some of the changes of self. He was not that lucky; he had to move from the earthquake of the personal life to the whirlpool of the office, without much breath in between.

He had tried to explain that yesterday. She really did try to understand. But like it or not, the traces of past observation interfered with the conversation of today. Then there was her friend Marian's marriage to John. A man altogether as wholesome as her own lover, when sober. She had witnessed the destructive evenings when John slumped over his drink and slurred out disparaging remarks. She watched Marian's agony when she tried to leave John in the sober light of the next morning, her heart tugged by all of the positive reminders of his strengths. In the light of sweet reason and love, she minimized the night before. But there was always a new night. Until finally, Marian did leave. She had finally drawn the courage to stand up to the rationalizations, and his pleas. She knew that he needed her, he didn't have to say it, but he did say it. She also knew that he could not give up the drink that was destroying the fabric of their creative life. There were other such examples, but none so intimate as John and Marian.

There had been Elizabeth and Will. Will beat her. Then there were the best friends of her childhood whose fathers drank. She had watched the promise of the good and the beautiful disintegrate into ugly quarrels and unremembered words.

She was brought back to her own morning light by the silence after the sound of the shower stopped. Funny, some independent corner of her mind reflected, how the lack of a sound can be louder than its presence. So too in their life. She knew it would not be easy to live without him. The rich deep content of these past months had been opening doors left and right.

In her soul these doors began banging shut in anticipation of alcoholic weekends that would continue through their lives. It would not stop after they quit the Foreign Service. Like it or not, this habit had been, was and would remain the same. Even when they built the little A-frame house by the sea.

What was it he had said last night after that awful mob-scene party? She was still trying to fight the growing awareness of this third partner to their marriage. He sat with a glass of wine, and she with her tea. The peace of their home calmed her somewhat after the frenzy of so many people. As he had noted, however, the weekend left her "dis-eased." Perhaps it was the incessant round of parties which had marked the weekend. This weekend time was usually filled with the solitude of their love and creative endeavors. The quiet lake and a few flickering boat lanterns recalled the joy as he looked into their future of evenings at home with the surf pounding and a fire crackling. Usually this sparked her own responsive glow. Last night, all she could think of was the third partner.

Simple as she was, she could not understand how he was willing to sacrifice the new-found intimacy he had insisted he had not known before. He did want the intimacy, but he wanted it on his terms, which included drink.

Early on in their love, when she was still living in Daimondi, they had confronted the issue of their mutual strong wills. Now they laughed over it. "The problem," she had quietly shouted, "is not that we don't want love. It's just that you want it on your terms, and I want it on mine!"

But now, for the first time, she had second thoughts. This morning, when he said "There's still time to reconsider" she didn't have a ready answer.

Was it the first time? Actually, it wasn't. Though it was the first time she vocalized these thoughts to him. She had, she remembered with surprise, recognized the third partner when she was away from him recently. There was the dismay when she called him long distance and realized that he was "out of it," This had been counterbalanced by her pleasure when in his letter he indicated he was on a health kick: no drinks during the week, and daily tennis. And before this endless weekend began, she woke up at 5 a.m. Friday morning with the same stark realization after having skirted the issue the night before when she had been preparing to apply for her diplomatic passport under her soon to be new married name.

Now he came out of the bathroom and dressed. Their mornings, usually so complete with communion, were rendered by their avoidance.

"Breakfast?" she asked.

His brief glance said no.

She pattered out to the kitchen for another cup of coffee, trying to retain a semblance of normalcy. He turned on the radio for the early morning news on VOA, and flipped through a magazine. As she settled back on the coverlet, her eyes caught the waving thread, now shadowed by the reflection of a crow as it swooped outside their window drawing its image-wings softly over the curtains. The ubiquitous crows, and the vultures, that lurk in this stage where life goes on in its repeated cycles of birth and death. Lurk in order to clean up the remains of what was.

It was then that he again curtly and painfully reminded her that he didn't like to be judged. The wisdom of his years, some fifteen more than hers, wanted to convince her of this truth. She listened with her head but her heart denied. And a record played on in her ears. Latin music, which from the beginning was the theme song of their stormy union. "Es imposible, mi cielo, tan separados vivir. Tan separados vivir." It's impossible, my love, to live separated from you. Which partner would he choose?

Dispassionately, she rehearsed the lines in her head. "It is with great regret that we announce the cancellation of our engagement, due to our recognition of mutually irreconcilable differences."

I honestly do not recall reading that story out in Dacca. I ran across it several years later while sorting through some papers. In any case it is a startling revelation with respect to Mystery's insight into the cunning, baffling and powerful influence of alcohol. If, indeed, I did read it out in Dacca it is also a manifestation of my own ignorance of alcoholism as well as my own selfish, self centered denial of a disease that was destroying me and my relationship with not only Mystery, but many of my colleagues. There had been no misunderstanding at the Marine Ball. I had made a smart assed, nasty remark to an undeserving friend, and I was too drunk to remember it.

What is interesting about Mystery's story is that the battle lines, so to speak, had been clearly defined. I recognized that her strong career interests presented a problem. Mystery recognized that my drinking presented a problem.

Nevertheless, when Mystery left Dacca just before Christmas of 1978 to return to Berkeley for the last leg of her doctoral work it was with the idea that she would complete her program, and return to Bangladesh to be married.

Early in 1979 I learned that I was to be transferred to Costa Rica at the conclusion of my tour in Dacca. In April of that year Mystery returned to Dacca. We were married in a small ceremony in the house and followed the private wedding with a large, garden party reception that was in keeping with the best of parties from days of the British Raj. The Deputy Chief of Mission offered his official residence for the party, and we invited all of our many friends from the diplomatic, PVO and business communities. It was billed as the social event of the season. The next day we left Dacca for a short honeymoon in Katmandu, Nepal before returning to pack up for our transfer to San Jose, Costa Rica.

We went first to Washington for my consultation, then out to Berkeley for Valerie's official graduation. In Berkeley we picked up a brand new Datusn 280 ZX and drove over to Las Vegas so that she could see the house I owned there. She also too advantage of the visit to contact the University of Nevada to explore future job possibilities. After that we returned to California and rented a house on the beach at Malibu for a month. Just before leaving the States for San Jose we learned that there might be a job opportunity for Valerie in Costa Rica, and when we arrived in San Jose she had some expectations that she could put her newly acquired PhD to work.

The job never materialized, and as a 34 year old modern woman, with a brand new PhD, Valerie was not inclined to the life of teas, shopping and tennis that are typical for a Foreign Service wife. She did give it her best shot though by getting involved in volunteer work and studying Spanish.

In late October Valerie received and accepted an offer of a three month consulting contract in Ethiopia which was much more to her liking. She returned from Ethiopia to San Jose on Christmas Eve and from that time until August 1980 we lived about like any other Foreign Service couple. At one point we even considered having children.

This was short-lived though. In the summer of the next year we took two weeks vacation and went to Spain where I showed Valerie all of the places I loved. In August she received and accepted a job offer from the United Nations as a Training Officer to be based in New York.

We saw one another four times over the next four months, but it was becoming clear that we were drifting apart. On one visit Valerie flew down from New York, and I flew up to Miami from San Jose, and I mentioned my feelings to her. We were sitting on the beach. As I told her of my feelings of becoming isolated from one another I had a vision of waves washing over a sand castle left behind by people who had been on what was then an abandoned beach. I returned to San Jose and I was very lonely. To ease the pain of my solitude I drank, and started a luke warm love affair with a little bit of love with a young Peace Corps Volunteer.

Toward the end of that year, 1980, I was offered a transfer to Mogadishu, Somalia. Since I had previously served in Somalia in 1967-69 the idea of returning to see what it was like after fifteen years appealed to me. I accepted the transfer, spent Christmas in New York with Valerie, and in late January I arrived in Mogadishu.

Mogadishu revisited was a bitter-sweet experience - more bitter than sweet. There was an excitement in returning to a country that had been an important part of my life, and in renewing old friendships. Mogadishu had been the first post that Yvvette and I shared. It was the place where we had taken our daughter, Christine, home from Ethiopia, where she was born, when she was just ten days old. One Saturday morning shortly after my arrival back in Somalia I drank a couple of beers and drove up to the old house where we had lived in 1967. It was occupied by a nice German couple and it was a st range sensation to walk into the house again. It was smaller than I remembered. By a stroke of good luck I even managed to locate my old servant, Aden, who came back to work for me. Many of his recipes he had learned from Yvette.The excitement did not last long, however. The work was hard, and Mogadishu was just as remote and isolated as it had been fifteen years earlier. In many respects things seemed harder and more difficult than they had the first time around. Maybe it was because I was fifteen years older. I was not a cynic, but I had lost a lot of my idealism.

Just beneath all of the nostalgia was an anger at the ambivalence and ambiguity of my situation with Valerie. Even though I had agreed to her accepting the job with the UN, I resented having to be alone to set up a household and live as a single person while being married. That was not my idea of what marriage was supposed to be.

When I left New York for Somalia Valerie expected to follow me in about two weeks. She had arranged her schedule in such a way that she would do some work in East Africa and combine it with a couple of weeks of leave. As bureaucracies will do, however, the UN changed her plans. Valerie passed the word of the change to the State Department Desk Officer in Washington, who in turn passed it on to the Mission in Mogadishu as an aside in a long distance phone call on another subject. I learned of it in a staff meeting when the Mission Director, while looking over his notes from the phone call, said, "Pete, do you know someone named Valerie? Her arrival has been delayed until May." I was very disappointed, and to top things off, a few days later I broke my foot and had to have a cast and use crutches for two months. In late May Valerie finally did come for two weeks, and in July I joined her in New York for my home leave.

This was the worst home leave I had ever spent. Valerie was working, and I passed my days in the small East side apartment she had rented. But it was a preview of what life would be like after I retired since I could see that Valerie had no intention of leaving her job with the UN. If we were to continue as a married couple I would have to remain in New York. This was something that I had never, ever imagined doing. Before I was appointed to the Foreign Service I had lived in New York. I hated it then, and I still hated it. We bickered and quarreled the entire summer. I did a lot of drinking, and in October I returned to Mogadishu at the end of my home leave.

At various times during the summer I thought about not retiring, but I had maneuvered myself into a box by accepting the assignment in Somalia. If I did not retire it would mean spending two more years in lonely isolation in Mogadishu, and if I did retire it meant going to New York. Neither prospect looked bright, but I was burned out on Africa, and overseas living in general. I decided to go ahead with my retirement. I had programmed myself to retire and I could not get into a different mind set. I served out my time by working long hours and I spent my evenings drinking in the UN and Anglo-American Beach Clubs. In late December I left Somalia for Washington, D.C. to retire, and unbeknownst to me at that time enter an alcohol rehabilitation center.

On a wintry Christmas Eve of 1981 in Washington, D.C. I sat in the office of a State Department Medical officer, a doctor. I was on the verge of retiring from a more than twenty year career in the Foreign Service. In the course of my final physical examination a medical problem showed up that was related to my many, especially the last two, years of heavy drinking. The doctor insisted that before he would sign off on my retirement physical I would have to talk to the State Department's alcohol abuse counselor. I saw the counselor. He asked me how much I drank, and did I drink everyday?

When I answered him, I lied, but by the grace of God, I listened to him when he told me "If you don't quit drinking you're not going to make it. You're going to die."

I didn't want to die. I wanted to live, so when the counselor suggested that I go into a 28-day alcohol rehabilitation program, I agreed. I was a willing patient since for some time I had known that my drinking was out of control. I had the desire to stop drinking, and I surrendered to reason.

On Christmas Eve, with no drums or trumpets, no fanfare, I walked out of the State Department into a light falling snow; my twenty year career as a Foreign Service officer was ended, and I took the train to New York to join Valerie.

The next week, in a motel room on a snowy New Year's day in the Pennsylvania Dutch country of the Pocono Mountains, I had my last drink then drove with Valerie to Chit-chat Farm, an alcohol treatment center. That was the one of the most significant choices I have ever made; it was the beginning of the most important period of self-discovery, growth and increasing awareness in my life. From the time that I entered the rehab center I began to take my life seriously in terms of trying to figure out why I had such a mess on my hands. I was curious to know why my life had become so unmanageable.

GO TO CHAPTER 32

Gene McCoy ) July 1998

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) 1997 g inofso@gte.net