Marie Cloutier

Word Count 1523

In February of  2023, I learned that my first love had died. Our relationship spanned seven years between 1991 and 1998. When I met him, I was a first-year student at Wellesley College; I went on an early online chat service called IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, and one night met a 66-year old philosophy professor for a west coast liberal arts college. Marvin and I hit it off right away. I was enthralled with his humor and smarts, and he seemed besotted with me, calling himself "your aged admirer." His attention left me dizzy; online chatting turned into daily phone calls and we formed an intense and special friendship. By the time our relationship ended in 1998, we'd met in person twice, and he'd become my first lover.

Over the many years since our breakup, I had looked him up online now and then. I might find something about him or his family but then I'd look away, close the tab, and wish I hadn't. After a while, I wondered what more was I hoping to learn. That he died? I knew he was old, and I told myself that his death would bring relief, that it would bury everything that happened between us for good. I was defenseless against the tsunami the news would bring.

After my relationship with Marvin ended I met and married a wonderful man. I worked as a librarian and bookseller, traveled all over the world to great cities and beautiful beaches. I've had the chance to develop rewarding hobbies- quilting, piano, and language study. And I've made many wonderful friends from different quarters of my life.

But apart from a handful of college friends, almost no one knows about this other man. It's not that I meant to keep him a secret; there was just no reason to bring him up, an ex-boyfriend from long ago. But the truth is I was ashamed. Marvin was so much older; he was also married, although I didn't know that for years, and he kept me a secret too. When his wife passed, commenters on her obituary lauded their "remarkable" and "extraordinary" marriage. When he died no one knew that I existed, so no one knew to tell me that he died. That I had to find out through an online search still feels humiliating, a humiliation that still fuels the other anger I've been living with these past 25 or so years. Anger at his lies, at myself for believing him and for being with someone who lied to me. I was also angry at myself for the lies I told, and for how those lies isolated me and kept me from deepening friendships that I should have had in my college years.

Though I told my husband right away, I thought I could keep it all buried, all this anger and memories and pain. I had kept a diary in college, pages covering all the years of our relationship, and had lived in terror that someday someone would read it and know all my secrets. The week after I read the obituary a burst of anger drove me to tear the pages from its red cover and toss them in the garbage. When I realized what I'd done I cried for the first time. So much more was gone that I could never get back.

A friend of mine lost her husband not long after Marvin died and my pain seemed like nothing, something that should remain in shadow; I was no one's sainted widow, just the dirty secret of a married man. I didn't deserve to talk about it. Who could I tell? My community knew me as a happily married woman with a privileged life. This old relationship seemed so out of character- so out of that character. I realized there were no more than five people in my life who knew me then, and everyone else only knew me as part of a rosy couple.

I didn't want to be this unruly mess, red-eyed and alone with these waves, but I didn't know how to be the person I was before, who'd kept all these feelings at bay for two decades. But keeping it all to myself meant walking barefoot under the tides, my body upright while waves lashed me and rocks sliced my soles below. I tried to smile but the riptides kept coming; they came and they pulled me out while I worked, or sewed, or practiced a new arpeggio. Sometimes, in the weeks that followed, as I went about my usual activities, between tasks or after a piano lesson, every now and then I'd collapse into heavy, heaving sobs, cry for hours, tissues piling in every wastebasket of our small apartment. Even my hairdresser noticed. I came in for a cut masked up per Covid protocols. My red eyes showed what I couldn't yet tell. "Girl, you look so sad," Kodumu said.

Three days after I found the obituary I had a regular appointment with a therapist I'd been seeing for about a year. I told her everything. "I'm shocked," she said, "I'm shocked. This is an elderly gentleman." She adjusted her collar. "But Marie, he was a pedophile," she paused again. "He was just interested in young girls. And I'm sure- I'm sure- you were not the only one." I receded. None of this resembled the man I knew. Anyway what did it matter? Therapy was supposed to be about my feelings, about giving me the chance to be heard. I tried with a friend, a woman in her early fifties I'd known for about ten years. I forwarded her the obituary so she'd have a sense of who he was in the world, not just a name and an age. "Which one of Dante's circles of Hell do you think he's in?" she mused. I knew I was supposed to laugh but I pulled further out. My insides were exposed, raw and salt bit. I knew he'd taken advantage of me. But I didn't need someone to villainize him or paint me as a victim. I needed someone to listen.

And whatever was inappropriate or problematic about our relationship, Marvin was still someone I loved, who'd loved me and who'd played a formative role in my young life. He'd taken time for me, so much time. He talked to me like an equal. He listened to me, to all my moods and musings and every silly thing I said. He told me I was a "prize" and a "treasure". He yelled at an infirmary nurse at Wellesley once when I was sick because he thought they didn't do enough to help me. Once when I was alone at my mother's house and anxious he called me six times in a single day just to keep me company. I was flattered by his attention, of course, such an impressive and important man making me a priority, but he told me that he was the lucky one, lucky to have me in his life. He spent time with me almost every day for six years, even when it was just "goodnight, my love" at the end of a day when one of us couldn't make it at our usual time. He ended every conversation that way.

It was all coming to the surface now, this part of my bone structure, this piece of my history. It had to. One morning in April 2022 my college friend Jean reached out with an ordinary hello. Jean and I met in 1992, my sophomore year at Wellesley. By the time we'd become close I was worn out by lying about Marvin, as well as with the isolation the lies walled me into. Desperate to trust someone with my secrets, I told her one ordinary night in her dorm room. She responded with calm and compassion back then, and we'd remained close since college; she was a bridesmaid in my 2003 wedding. In 2022 we were both nearly 50 and living in the New York area, though since Covid we'd kept in touch via email. That morning I'd just come back from a trip to California with my husband, sand from Venice Beach still in my shoes. Jean caught me up on her news for a chatty paragraph, then "How are things with you and Jeff?"

"Fine." I could feel my bones pressing up through my arms, salt building in my eyes, about to wash over my cheeks again. "Do you remember my friend, the philosophy professor, from college? He died.”

Marie (she/her) is a writer and poet. Her work has appeared in HerStry, Corvus Review, Scribes Micro, Bare Back Magazine and elsewhere. She is at work on a memoir about disenfranchised grief. Her website is www.mariecloutier.com.