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I told him I wanted a divorce, it was not easy to say the words but I couldn't believe he would really be surprised after all those months of no contact at his request. It was our first conversation in many months, it was around the new year 1996. Phil mentions some CDs and tapes of mine he's found, that he accidentally took with him when he moved back in with his mother. And then I'm asking him about a few albums of mine I haven't been able to find, like Procol Harum Broken Barricades, could he see if he'd accidentally taken it with him? Sure, he says. Our talk becomes chummy and relaxed. At least that's how I perceive it.
A few minutes later he calls back, voice tremulous. "You hurt my feelings, asking about those records. How could you bring up something so petty..."
I tell him, as kindly as I can, that he was the one who broached that subject, and that I was just trying to make conversation in an awkward situation. We plan to meet at our therapist's, to discuss the divorce.
I will never forget his sorrowful face, that day in the therapist's office, or the way he hugged me goodbye, for the last time, on that Santa Monica street. "I loved you," he said, at my car. I don't remember if I said I'd loved him too. He gave me my old tapes, I don't think he gave me Broken Barricades, or did he? The hug was substantial, hot and real. No one had hugged me like that for a long time. It was not sexual, it was everything else emotional that our relationship had been, that is, it was the good side.
After that day, we said only a few bickering words to each other over the phone about the divorce proceedings. The last time he spoke to me was almost a year and half after that day at the therapist's. I was walking down Silver Lake Blvd., he walking up from the same club, it was around nine o'clock, May. We were alone on the street, we were trapped. I steeled myself, I smiled at him, he was smiling too. I readied myself to stop and talk with him. "Fancy seeing you here," he said, smiling, and kept walking. I went inside the nightclub, into the life I had longed for and struggled for and won (though it too was a struggle at times), and couldn't shake the surreality of that encounter, after thirteen years of companionship, good, bad and indifferent. But my friend Doris was waiting for me - and Ed, who I'd yelled at on the same stretch of street less than a week before, was still speaking to me.
The other day I got a CD of Procol Harum's first album. Phil gave me the English pressing of that record when I was seventeen, it was a present for me when I got my wisdom teeth removed. My jaw swelled so much that my face looked triangular. That copy of the album has vanished, Phil must have taken it back at some point, perhaps when we consolidated our record collections somewhat. Listening to Procol Harum's first album for the first time in years, listening to "She Wandered Through the Garden Fence," I am able to recapture the seventeen year old I was, and to remember the part of my relationship with Phil that fed me. He did share things with me, music he loved. It was too much his, his music - I think when we split up he would have liked it if every record he ever played for me was magically erased from my brain. But as I sit, typing at work with Procol Harum in my earphones, a momentary surge of good will towards my ex-husband and our relationship is here. Then gone.
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