Twenty-five years ago at this time my marriage, at that point about 9.25 years old, was rapidly eroding beneath my feet. I had no idea. On the contrary, it seemed to me as though after a couple of turbulent years we had finally reached firm ground again. The warning signs stand out quite starkly in hindsight, but my radar simply did not register these at the time.

She ran off later in the year with a young man who is presently "Director of [redacted]” at Apple. As I became aware of the liaison that spring I fatally did not take it seriously: this guy was five years old, for fuck’s sake, the first time I chatted up my future sweetheart and ex-wife at a high school dance late in 1968. Geez!

The guy who got her; her: http://homepage.mac....ris_and_helen.jpg

Her fortunes skyrocketed after she left home. For as long as we lived with one another, her annual income was about three quarters of mine. Her first year on her own, as a tech writer, she doubled my figure.

In the event, she ended up living with her abductor for longer than she did with me. She and I last saw one another in Oakland at the beginning of 1992 (she was briefly visiting California for the first time since her relocation to Munich in 1988), and the exchange, while fraught, was largely cordial. I learned by chance that she’d returned to live stateside in 1996, and made a shrewd guess as to a telephone number at which she might be reached. The conversation was a brief one, hostile and unreceptive on her side, with no clue as to what might have changed in the four years since our last contact.

She split up with the kid at the end of that decade, and her internet trail went abruptly very, very cold. I have attempted over the years to track her down—not because I imagine that we will have a magical reconciliation and reunion, but because I think there are issues remaining between us that could benefit from an airing out. Poetic justice: Now I’m the one who wants to talk about relationships. Go figure.

She has detected a couple of my probes over the years, and has likely construed these as “stalking.” I am accordingly more discreet (because it does, I suppose, partake a bit of stalking) these latter months.

Nevertheless, my viper tongue flickers forth, and she has briefly uncloaked for long enough for me to establish a physical address. Sweet Jesus, it’s an RV park. Well, for as long as I’ve known her (beginning in September 1968) she always said that she wanted to live in the woods. But this?

http://maps.google.c...33&gl=us&t=h&z=16

I’m bad. I’d rather learn that her post-Rand fate was this than that she was presently drawing alimony from Larry Ellison and living on a vast estate in Woodside. But I also remember that I adored her obsessively from the time I was sixteen until that love flickered out in my forties, and would not wish upon her a precarious life in a Winnebago.

cordially,

know that the estranged ex was on sounder financial footing. Selfishly because there's a provision in California law that could conceivably permit the state to come after me should she happen to become a burden upon the public treasury; selflessly because I do not wish her ill. This emotional spectrum grades back into selfishness as it progresses, because again I resentfully after all these years do not wish indecent prosperity upon her.

cordially,