Americans Talk About Love

Like, once I went fishing with my mother and a guy came down to the river where we were and she started talking to him and they ended up drinking some beers together. And this is a small town where everybody knows everybody, and like, he had his hand on her leg the whole time and she’d been married to my stepdad for like 15 years at the time. They did it right there in front of me. And then a couple of days later, the guy pulls up in our driveway, and I’m standing outside, and I’m like, “Oh shit.” I walk up to the car very calmly and he’s like, “Is your mom here?” I’m like, “That’s my dad over there. I think it’s best that you leave.” So he backs out of the driveway and my dad comes over and he goes, “Who was that?” I’m like, “He got the wrong address.” That’s tough to do when you’re 12. So my mother pretty much ruined me as far as trust goes with women. I don’t think that — I think I could trust a woman. It’s just not like something that I would immediately do.

Being raised in Tennessee from around 7 to 14, they have a lot of mixed ideas there, a lot of backwoods, backward ways. I remember my grandmother slicing her wrists. I saw the blood trails. When I was like 6 or 7, this kid named Kevin molested me. I didn’t like it. He was like, “Don’t tell anybody.” I was like, “Well, fine. I’m not gonna tell anybody.” He was like 13. And when I was 4, I had two girls in my neighborhood that used to fool around with me. They were sisters. They were 7 or 8. They’d be like, “Do this to me. Do that to me.” I basically went down on them and I mean they definitely didn’t have hair down there, anything like that.

I pulled a gun on my brother when I was 11 years old. It was a 410 shotgun, single shot. I pointed it at him because they were being rambunctious and I was like, “You’re gonna calm down, you’re gonna listen to me.” So I got sent to a mental hospital. And then the day I got back from the mental hospital, my mother was in jail for DUI.

When I was like 13,14, 15 — my mother would be out drinking and driving almost every night. I would sit and wait by the window or outside on the porch waiting for my mother. Like a dog waiting for its master to come home. I didn’t know what to expect. Was my mother dead? Was she in jail again?

I met my ex-wife, Jackie, when she was 12 years old and I was 17. We kind of had this little thing. We did drugs together, smoked weed, basically. I really didn’t get involved too much in the heavier drugs. But she made it known that she liked me and I was like, “You’re 12.” At that point in my life, I had girls flocking all over me so it was more like, we’ll be friends.

And we were friends. She was really mature. I think it’s because maybe that she was molested when she was a kid and it made her grow up really fast. She never told me who it was. She was afraid I might do something about it.

I never tried anything with her. Like maybe I kissed her a couple of times or something, but I never tried to get down her pants ’cause she was so young — I think she was like 13 or 14 around that time. And she told me she had been molested, but she hadn’t been raped, so she was a virgin. And basically she told me that she was ready for me to take her virginity. At the time, she stayed with her sister in Georgia. And she called me and was like, “Hey, we want to meet you in Chattanooga.” She’s like, “I’m ready.” And I was like, “Oh my God, man. I don’t know what to do.” But I wanted to see her. I took my brother with me, and I told her, you know, “You don’t have to do this if you’re not ready.” She was like, “This is what I want.” I’m like, “OK.” So later on that night I took her virginity.

And then immediately the next day I felt bad about it. And also, her sister, Carrie, was older. I thought she was more my type. I just kind of stayed away from Jackie. Which made her feel really bad, like basically, you know, he doesn’t have feelings for me anymore and he took my virginity. But you have to remember I lived in a different state. I called her from time to time, but like, I wasn’t pursuing her for that.

So, a few months went by and I went to visit her in Florida and when I was going there, my car broke down, and her parents had the great idea to have her sister [in Georgia] pick me up. So she met me halfway, took me back home to her place and was like, “Yeah, I’m tired. I’ll take you home tomorrow.” And then another day went by and she’s like, “Oh, I’m tired. I’ll take you home tomorrow.” And every day she did something else to try and lure my attention. And every day it got more and more difficult and I was trying — not that I had any commitment with Jackie, I just didn’t want her feelings to be hurt. I knew it was probably the wrong thing to do. So a week goes by and like Carrie’s coming out of the shower in her robe and she’s like, “Do you want a massage?” And with the hot oil and all this and I’m like, “Oh my God. I can’t control myself.” So I broke down and ended up spending about a month there. And then finally, I was like, “Look, I can’t do this.”

So I made her take me back home. And then Jackie comes to Georgia to stay with her sister and — things are really fuzzy. All I know is that I went back to Georgia and Carrie didn’t want to tell Jackie I was sleeping with her because she thought her sister would hate her. Which she did when she found out. But when Jackie got there she wanted to sleep with me too, so I was at a loss what to do. I ended up sleeping with both of them at different times of the day. While one was at work I would do it with one and while the other was at work — it was a very confusing, exhausting time for me, and they both were subconsciously aware of the fact, though I don’t think they admitted it to themselves at that time.

Then Jackie started hanging around with all her friends doing heroin and coke and roofies and all these different drugs. She was fooling around with this kid that was 15, and she ended up getting pregnant. She told me about it, and she was like, you know I don’t believe in abortion. And she was going to have the baby. Well, I felt guilty. Because I’m the one who took her virginity. I fucked around with her sister. I felt like she had done this stuff to find a way to try to get me off of her mind or to forget the situation. And I basically didn’t really have any relationship-type interest, but we were still friends, and I felt guilty. I was like, “Well, this kid is gonna need a father.” I felt like, you know, I had to marry her and get her away from these people.

So, when I was 21 and she was 16, we got married. I mean, I loved her, but I didn’t love her like “in love,” you know, like a fairy tale love story. Basically, before we got married, I had sex with another woman, because I felt like once I got married I wasn’t gonna do that stuff.

I adopted her kid by the other guy, Robbie. It wasn’t a legal adoption. It was basically like a mental adoption. But I mean from — immediately we had problems. Her father was abusive toward her mother and shattered her knee in a domestic argument. That’s her memories as a kid. She blocked a lot of them out but they were still with her constantly, and every time I would raise my voice, it would scare the hell out of her. And I’m a very passionate person. I tended at that time to get in people’s faces. So, she would leave me. I trusted her, but in the back of my mind, because I cheated on her before we got married, I always had it in the back of my mind that she’s gonna try to get me back. Like I really thought she was gonna try to really hurt me, so, you know. I was really jealous and really afraid, and every now and then when she was pissed off she would tell me some shit, like, just to enrage. And this went on in Florida — you know, every time the police are called somebody’s got to go to jail. So one time she went to jail, and three times I went to jail.

But she loved me. I mean, she still puts it this way today, she “worshipped the ground I walked on.” And I didn’t appreciate that at all. I was very self-centered, very selfish, you know, was like, “OK, I’m gonna go to work, you stay here with the kids, you cook, you clean, and like, the money that I make is my money.” At the time I had not a great job, you know. I was a nurse’s assistant. I was working 16-hour shifts five days a week so I was bringing home $1,500 every couple of weeks, which isn’t great. It was horrible. When I look back and think what a ridiculous person I was — I mean it was so bad that she’d be like, “Can you buy me a water?” And I’d be like, “I’m not buying water. What’s wrong with you?” When she would cry I would be like, “Shut up. Be strong.” I would basically run her in the ground for crying. Because I never cried as a kid, really. I remember being slapped so hard that my ears rang — and I didn’t cry. And like, when my grandma died I didn’t cry.

We stayed married for four years. However, we only lived together in that time maybe a year. Three or four months after we got married, Jackie got pregnant with Bethany. And then after that came Jason and Amber.

After we were divorced I moved back to Tennessee and we still maintained contact. Jackie was always the type of person — she wasn’t real promiscuous. Like, we had sex even after we were divorced — I mean forever. But I was living in Tennessee with my brother in a duplex. And my stepdad’s father had died, and my stepdad gave us each four grand. So I’m talking to Jackie and I’m like, “I’m gonna come down and see you. Can we stay at your place?” We wanted to go have a good time with the money. You know. “Can you hook my brother up with Andrea?” She had a friend living with her named Andrea. I’ve known Andrea since she was like 12 years old. And now she’s like 20 or something like that so. I talked to Andrea and Andrea said, “Sure.” OK. So we get there. Everything works out. My brother gets with Andrea. I get with Jackie.

And then Jackie and I get in a dispute, so I have to leave. The money was running low by the time the dispute happened. So I went to a dock and tried to get on a shrimp boat ’cause I heard you don’t need any sort of documentation whatsoever, it’s under the table, you just jump on the boat and go long days, whatever. So I’m on the boat, and my brother’s been at Jackie’s for, I guess, three weeks, something like that, and I’m like, “Yo, don’t you think it’s time you go back home?” And he’s like, “Yeah. I just need some money.” I’m like, “Well, get a job.” So three weeks turns into three years and Andrea has moved out and, you know, I get to Key West, and then my captain was on heroin, and I couldn’t take it, and a friend offered me a place in New York, so I moved to New York.

And I’m like constantly — every time I’m talking to my kids and Jackie, I’m like, “Yo, he’s gotta leave. This isn’t right.” My kids are there, you know. It doesn’t seem right. And a year after I’m here in New York, they’re like, “We’re together.” So I completely freak out. I think I had a nervous breakdown, and I talk to my brother and I’m like, “Look, man, if you had sex with her that’s OK. I can forgive you. Just please, just move out.” And he’s like, “No, we’re together.” And at that point I start screaming like a mad man. I’m like, “I’ll fucking kill you!” Like, “Don’t even turn your back for a minute if you see a shadow out of the corner of your eye it’s gonna be me, I’m coming to kill you. You better believe it. You’re dead. You’re dead.”

The thing is that he’s my brother and that coming from a trailer trash background that’s the last thing I felt my kids needed is to have some sort of shit like that go on in their life to affirm to them that they are redneck trailer trash hillbilly fucking hicks and that that’s all they’re ever gonna be. You know? And now he’s not their uncle anymore, he’s Trevor. They’re married now and they have a kid of their own so now, my kids’ sister is also their cousin. And it pisses me off. They didn’t have any kids at the time and I felt like they should have walked away from it.

I don’t talk to him. When he answers the phone, I say, “Where’s my kid?” And that’s the most I’ve talked to him in two years. But … there’s a joke I didn’t get for a long time, but now I get it. This guy who’s in prison for 10 years comes home and he knocks on the trailer door and his wife answers the door. She invites him inside and he looks over and there’s a guy sleepin’ on the couch. And he says, “Who the fuck is this guy sleepin’ on my couch?” She says, “That’s the man that’s been payin’ the bills for the last 10 years.” And the guy says, “Well shit. Give him a blanket! He looks kinda cold.” My brother’s paying the bills, you know. He takes care of my kids. He gets ‘em private tutors if they want. I’m like, “Well, shit!” That man is doing better than I could’ve done. I think they’re really in love and I’m happy for ‘em. My kids are happy and I don’t pry too much. I was mad before, but now I’m more contented with the situation.

You know, I felt bad when I left. She begged me not to go. And I’m like, I can’t be here. I can’t live like this. I can’t. And my youngest son was like a month old and my — I couldn’t conceive of the responsibilities that I was taking on at the time. After I was married I didn’t know what my responsibilities were. I really lacked in them, and I was really selfish and it was to my own detriment and now it’s to my children’s detriment as well because their father’s not there to be with them.

If you were to see me 10 years ago you wouldn’t believe I was the same person. I had a mullet. For like, five years. When I was a kid you probably couldn’t understand me when I spoke. I was like — I’ll spell it out for you. I’d say “An-kur.” For “I don’t care.” That’s what I used to say to my teachers in school. I was such a disgruntled kid.

When I first moved to New York I had not the slightest idea of what prosperity was. This was only five years ago. In Tennessee, it was always just a hundred junked cars parked on the property, you know, the front porch falling in, everybody living in trailers, nobody wanting to do better for themselves. It was like knowledge was evil and the more you learned or the more diverse you are, they think you’re a pussy, or you’re — I don’t wanna say liberal, because they don’t use that word. Like “nigger-lover.”

So in New York, I saw people that not only had jobs, but they were in school at the same time and they still had a social life … they juggled. That to me was so awe-inspiring. How do people do this? And I sort of had this moment of epiphany, like, to try to be a better person. I think that there was just some ingrained desire to be a better person. You know, I want to learn. And the fact that I’m uneducated is balanced by the fact that I’m smart, witty, and I search for knowledge. I’m self-centered, but I’m loving and I’m caring and I’m helpful. I’ve learned a lot of restraint. I think just a person gets older — you kind of calm down a little and you start to learn that this type of behavior is unacceptable. And that nobody is going to be comfortable until you learn to deal with your anger a little better.

I don’t think I’ve ever been in love or trusted a woman — except Jackie. I learned more from her than I’ve ever learned from any other woman in my life. And also, she dealt with more than any woman could ever be expected to deal with. And when I look back I know at the time she truly loved me, and I took complete advantage of that.

If I met her today and she was the same person she used to be, and I was the person that I am now, I think things would be a lot different. I think, yeah, I could love her, that I would be lucky. I don’t think that I’ll ever find that kind of love again. I think I really screwed up. I don’t ever expect to experience that again.

I admire her and respect her because my children are in safe hands. And I’m so lucky that she is the person that she is. You know, she dropped out of school in the 7th grade, but she doesn’t drink, she doesn’t do drugs. My children are safe. They go to school, do their homework, she’s there for them — emotionally, physically. She loves them. She doesn’t talk bad about me. I mean she could say a million bad things about me and totally ruin my children’s thoughts about me, but she doesn’t do that. As far as I know.

I just recently met someone. She initiated the whole girlfriend-boyfriend type thing and I found it rather odd. She’s 17 — which is legal in the state of New York. I was waiting for lineup for my stripper job. I do go-go at a gay bar. I went outside for a smoke break and she was outside, and I said “Hi” to her and she ended up giving me her number and I called her up. This was like a month ago.

I’m really skeptical. You know, the age factor. The fact that she has a lot of guy friends that she’s possibly had relations with in the past. I don’t want to talk too much about this relationship.

My views on love are conflicted in my head so much that I may be an old man before I figure it out. I think that some form of companionship and “love” in quotations is necessary for human beings. Maybe not every single human being, but for most human beings, having a companion and someone that you love definitely helps heal the hurt, the stress of life, even if sometimes it makes life more stressful. But love is very elusive and if there were a precise definition I would like to know it.

I’m sure that I’ve felt something like love plenty of times in my life. I know it exists because I love my children. But have I loved anyone unconditionally? I mean even with my children, there’s conditions. I think that maybe things are what you perceive them to be. That if you think that you love, then you love. I would like to choose to believe that I have loved or that I can and am capable of love. I’m almost sure that it exists. But if it slapped me in the face, I couldn’t tell you what it was.

I was just kind of plugging along being a mom and being probably not the best wife in the world. I didn’t take care of myself as much as I should have the early years of our marriage. I got just so into the children, and I was just so focused on them and doing all the things that I was supposed to for them, that I didn’t do enough things like going to exercise class or just even going out and having fun with my girlfriends. I just way felt like I had to be the mom and be everything for everybody in that family. He wasn’t very helpful because he had stresses. Over a few years’ time, things were sort of deteriorating. It just sort of crept up on us. We just weren’t communicating.

There was one separation for a few months where my husband moved out. I can see myself and I can see him in the kitchen. I can’t remember really what led up to it. We must have been in some kind of discussion, but all I remember was we were both standing in the kitchen. He said he was leaving, something about that he was leaving. And I said, “Oh?” And I said, “When?”

He told me later he was shocked. I probably was feeling some relief.

That lasted a few months, and then he was back, and then it was maybe a year and a half later he started a relationship with someone and announced that he was leaving again. By then I didn’t know that he had another friend, but I knew I didn’t really care, because things were not that good.

We were divorced a few months afterwards, and it was then that I realized this was such a huge thing. I spent about a year sort of wallowing. I was devastated and really down on myself. It wasn’t that I missed him or was sorry that he was gone, but I was born and raised Catholic, and for that marriage to have failed was just a huge thing for me. A failure of the dreams that you have when you’re young, that this marriage that you got into was going to last forever.

In those first couple of years, so many things came up, things I didn’t give him credit for. Things that would happen around the house, and I’d go “Oh my God. What am I gonna do here?” Things that, you know, he was always there to take care of them. A lot of financial things. And different things that came up with the kids. I had a suspicion that my son was probably smoking marijuana, and what I did is I took these little weedy things that I found in his bedroom in a plastic bag up to the police station to ask if that’s what it was. The guy said, “You and your husband need to have a talk with this kid.” I guess Tom ended up talking to him. So that kind of stuff, everyday stuff of being a parent. I did miss that.

That same year a brother of mine died, and he was my favorite. He was an older brother and died suddenly, and I just felt, “Oh — there’s a lot goin’ on for me here. All my advisors are leaving me.” Because he was another one I could go to and ask questions.

But then I started learning to do things. Especially a lot of financial things that I had never bothered to — I had no idea about our family’s finances, and that was my fault because he had always encouraged me to be more interested. So I learned more about that. I was pretty independent.

We were divorced for five years. During those five years I think I thrived. I did my job. I did a lot of studying and got a higher position. I was a nurse in the oncology system at United Hospital in St. Paul, but I got into a supervisory position. I was very content with doing the things I was doing for myself — as far as my job went, as far as maintaining relationships with my children, who were by then off on their own.

I don’t think that I ever would have started a relationship with someone else. I had a couple guys that asked a couple times to go out to coffee, go out for a drink or something, but I just wasn’t interested in that. There are some religious values that I have of my Catholic upbringing, and unless I had a marriage annulled I would not have gotten married again to someone else. Or probably even have gotten into a relationship.

If someone had told me that we would ever get back together, I would have laughed. Because it wasn’t just a separation. We really did sever the ties. Except that we did have to communicate about the children.

While he was seeing this woman, we would get together for a couple of hours on Christmas. He came to my brother’s funeral. But there was nothing except he was there because it was his duty and I was tolerating his being there. We weren’t unfriendly, but we weren’t in any kind of relationship at that time.

Our first granddaughter was born about October of 1995. And there’s something that happens when [laughs] you become a grandparent. It feels like your heart is just sliced wide open — or for me anyway. I wasn’t aware of what was going on at the time, but there was so much love for this child that I was opened up to be able to receive again.

It’s probably similar to when you are first in love with a girl and you wake up every morning and everything is wonderful — that kind of thing. It does open you to other relationships ,and you’re a more optimistic and open person at that time, whereas when you’re getting ready to divorce and things are falling apart in your life, you’re more closed.

Looking back, that was the time when we began corresponding a little more. And then it was shortly after that I heard that he was no longer with this woman.

I can’t pick out a minute. It just evolved over a year’s time. We started visiting the grandchild together. And from there, once in a while we’d do stuff together — go to a concert or something. It seemed really natural. Then one day my daughter said to me, “Mom, are you and Dad dating?” And all of a sudden it occurred to me. “I guess we are.” [Laughs.]

I remember the first time we kissed again after all this time. It was at his home and I was dropping him off after we had gone somewhere. It felt like I was a young teenager having my first kiss. We weren’t staying over at each other’s houses or anything like that at that time. I remember going home and thinking, “Well, this is kind of silly that I’m feeling like a young kid again.”

And then another time, maybe a couple of weeks after that, when we were departing after a nice evening, I had driven and took him back to his house, and we were just having another little kiss goodnight — he said, “Dory, next time bring your toothbrush.” And I’m going “Oh my God.” Here I am, a grown woman, and I’m feeling pretty much like a young kid.

I think he wanted it a little more than I did, to get back together. I think he was lonely. I had learned to accept myself. I could have been happy just going on the way I had the last five years. It didn’t feel like I needed another person at that time. But, you know, we kept on; we had fun together.

We had talked about getting married again, but I still wasn’t sure if that’s what I wanted. We decided we’d wait until after our daughter’s wedding because we didn’t want take away from her enjoyment. I guess we waited another six months.

Our second wedding, we had a mutual friend who’s a judge in Pine City, Minn., and we got dressed up — not in wedding clothes. He wore a suit, and I wore a bright red dress, and we had corsages. We went up to the courthouse and his friend married us. Our kids didn’t come. We didn’t invite them. And then we went and had lunch with our judge friend and went out for dinner, and that was it.

So we got married December 26, 1966. We divorced in, I think it was, 1991, and we remarried in 1996. We celebrate our anniversary on the day that we were first married.

I guess I don’t look back and have any regrets about anything that we did. We weren’t the first people this had happened to. And more and more I hear about other people getting back together.

I think we’re in a really nice place in our lives now. We’re ready to help each other through whatever might come in the next years. We’re both getting a little older — any day there could be a health issue that could diminish one of us or devastate one of us.

It just — we grew back into a relationship that I’m pretty satisfied with now. And I think he is. That feeling of failure is gone now. And I think we both admitted to ourselves — probably not as much to each other — all the ways that each of us needed to change to make it work again.

We’re just so much more tolerant of each other. We’ve gone through a lot together and we’re older, and I think that getting older makes you see that there’s so much more to the world and to love and to life than what you see when you’re young.

It taught me there’s so much more to love. Accepting everything about the other person even though, in any relationship, everybody doesn’t love everything about that person, and if they say they do, I don’t think that they’re being honest.

In my everyday living with the guy, you realize you just have to let some of this stuff go. Little things — they seem like fairly childish to me.

We have our lake cabin on Lake Superior near Schroeder, Minn., like 78 miles northeast of Duluth. We actually spend seven or eight months of the year here. And then we have a condo down in the Twin Cities, in St. Paul.

OK, I’m looking out the window and I have some beautiful flowers and pots out here and stuff, and my husband. For about two or three weeks, he’s been running around the yard, buttoning things up for winter. You know, putting away hoses, putting covers on different parts of the house for winter so things don’t get in there. And it’s October. I’m going, “But we still have five weeks before winter. Do we really have to worry about this?” And he says, “Oh no, I’m not gonna be doing this in the middle of the winter.” And I pretty much need to close my eyes to it now.

Or: My husband has taken up cooking the last couple of years. I’m really thrilled about it now, but he’s rearranged the whole kitchen. The first day I came in and couldn’t find anything. I just was going ballistic. This happened a couple years ago. And now I just think, “OK! He cooks! Let it go and just keep looking for the stuff that you need.” So that’s a couple examples.

I guess that before, I was more controlling than I ever wanted to admit. I think I probably wanted things my way or no way a lot of the time. There was probably a lot of me overreacting, and him withdrawing. At the time you don’t think you’re overreacting at all. And he didn’t think he was withdrawing at all. But that’s what you learn after a lot of years of looking back.

When we were starting over, it felt like we didn’t have any real attachment to each other except we had been married so many years before — like 25 years. We were both free. I felt I was a different person and I had learned new things. And surely he had, too. I guess we had learned to be kind to each other again, or good to each other. To be more careful to listen to the other person and not reacting. Listening. I guess that’s a huge thing.

And then we had this new busboy. I remember seeing him one day when he was leaving. I was talking to my friend Carol, and I said, “Cool! Who’s that?” and she said, “It’s the new busboy.” He was Brazilian. He didn’t speak a word of English. He was picked up at the airport by another Brazilian guy, and the next day, he started working in our restaurant. He didn’t know anything. He had a family in Brazil. Kind of left his wife, really. They kind of split up. He had gone straight from her to working here and sending money back — that was the aim.

And we worked together for a long time. He had a really nice aura. Full of kindness, and he was hard-working. I suppose I really fancied him. The first time I saw him, I said to Carol, “I want to have his children.” [Laughs.] But I meant it. I had this feeling, “That’s the man I’m going to have children with.” I wanted to have children with someone I fancied and really liked, and I was in a relationship with someone that I didn’t really have a sexual sort of connection with.

He was two years younger than me. We would talk. He would ask me, “Can I have Coke, please?” and I’d say, “Who do you think you are that you can ask for drinks? Get back to work, you dog.” [Laughs.] He’d go really red. And I’d say, “I’m kidding. I’m joking.”

Most of our conversations were conducted between the Mexican busboy. Hector couldn’t speak English, so he would talk to the busboy in Portuguese, which is somewhat similar to Spanish, and the busboy would speak to me in English. Or he’d write me little notes in broken English. And then we arranged to go on a date. We met at the Telephone Bar in the East Village. He was all dressed up for it. He brought flowers.

I remember saying to him, “Do you want some wine?” And he didn’t understand that. I was like “Vino! Vino!” He had this little dictionary, and he took it out and I remember thinking, “How can he not understand ‘vino’? My God! He’s good-looking, but he’s an idiot!” And then we had sex and everything, and — I really did like him a lot!

And then I went back to France to visit my mom, and so it kind of stopped. I still had the boyfriend. But it was all right, because I’d found out that whenever he went back to Italy, to Rome, he would have little flings. So I thought, “OK. I understand now.” I understood why it hadn’t been right between us. And when I came back from France, Hector and I had another date. Next thing, we were sort of going out. We didn’t tell anybody. They caught us kissing in the corner, and then it all kind of came out.

When I said I wanted to have children, he gave me this little lecture about money and drinking and responsibility and not having money and how having children is a big responsibility. I ended up getting pregnant the next month. We wouldn’t have bothered to get married, but we needed to for him to get legal, to get his papers. So I had to get my citizenship, because I’d never bothered with that yet. Then we got married after my daughter was born — Dominique. We got married twice actually. He found out he hadn’t gotten divorced properly in Brazil, so we had to get that annulled, and then we got married again.

My brothers laugh at me. Because the count, just before I left him, he’d always be talking about his big estate. The big estate that he was going to get. Which he did. So my brothers always joke, “Ah yes, she left a distinguished Italian count for an illegal alien … who doesn’t speak English and is retarded.” [Laughs.] But now they really like him.

I love him. But I sometimes hate him. We fight a lot. Sometimes it’s money, because I spend more. I’m really bad with money. And he’s more organized. He’s a plumber’s helper. The money’s pretty bad, and he works long hours. We don’t have enough money to live — so sometimes it’s that. Sometimes we argue about me going out with other guys. I have a lot of male friends. They were friends I met before him. And it’s like, this very Latin thing — who you can see and can’t see. He wouldn’t speak to me for a few days. He was doing that for a while.

Oh, and we argue sometimes because he says I don’t let him finish what he’s saying. I finish his sentences with not the right ending. We argue like that, for lack of communication. On the phone, I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about. He doesn’t speak English properly. I don’t speak Portuguese. So sometimes he says something, and I say, “I don’t understand you!” [Screams.] In the office the other week, I found a plumber’s job for him on Craigslist. And I called him and told him, and he said, “What? What does you mean?” And I said, “I’m fucking helping you!” It drives me to distraction.

I think it’s a lot to do with not having a formal education. He doesn’t read … he didn’t even go to school. He went back to school a bit when he was about 18 or 19. I mean, he’s intelligent. But he was working when he was 8. He has made an effort. But — he’s crap at it. I thought he’d learn — and he didn’t! [Laughs.] But I’m not great at it either.

A friend of mine says you have to have three things in common: intellectual compatibility, emotional and sexual [compatibility]. So um, we don’t have intellectual. But that’s the thing: I have friends who have very intellectual relationships. That’s really important to them. So sometimes I think, “Am I missing out on all that?” Like, the best-friend kind of thing? But that’s the choice I made.

A lot of people don’t have much sex because of their lifestyles, but they’re still into each other. But a lot of people who have been in a relationship for quite a while — they don’t really talk about those intellectual things anymore. You talk to people about how did you meet, and they describe the thing, and they’re having this memory, and it’s so clear that the memory has to keep them going. They argue a lot. The way they speak about their partners, the way they speak to each other, the way they — everything. It turns my stomach … it’s so awful.

I’ll give you an example. I had a friend that I thought had a really wonderful relationship. She’d been with her partner for 10 years. They were both very intellectually in tune and very successful in the media and everything. They discussed everything, and they really seemed like close, close friends. And then she met another guy and she just fell in love with him. And of course, you know, problems had been happening, but nothing they ever talked about, or even they were problems that other people wouldn’t think were necessarily problems.

And she fell completely in love with this other guy who was completely the opposite of her partner. She broke off her relationship and her children and everything for this other relationship. When I thought back, there’s so many times when there was a kind of contempt. It came out just a little bit. He wasn’t very good at doing practical things. And I think a light bulb or something had gone off, or maybe it wasn’t a light bulb, it was something a bit more demanding, like maybe the fuse or something, and he was slightly unsure of what to do. And she said, “Just put that in there,” and she starts looking at him with absolute contempt and hatred.

I think being physically tied to somebody makes you maybe kinder than that. I think if you have a good sex life with somebody, there’s a fundamental respect for that person. There’s a boundary that you can’t cross, in terms of behavior between you. I think — when your lover becomes your best friend — you tell everything to him, and you share everything, and you work together, and you do everything together, maybe in the end, it becomes boring. Like, you can no longer smell the person, and it affects the sex. And ultimately, if you don’t have that physical connection, you will leave, or you’ll have an affair, or you’ll find someone else, because that’s what really you’re hungry for. I think sex is the only intuitive thing that you do. It’s not verbal. I think it demands a certain amount of mystery or independence to keep it good.

I have a lot of friends, who, when they’re talking about sex with their partner, they go, “Oh, I can’t bear it.” They pretend to be asleep. You know, this isn’t just one of my friends, it’s most friends, like 97 percent. They say that they have sex maybe every month or two months. And I’m thinking, “Why have I ended up different from my friends?” And I think it’s because we can relate sexually.

A lot of people I know that don’t have sex — it’s because they can’t be bothered. Since you can’t be bothered it means that you’re not too interested in the other person. And what differentiates that between a friendship? I’ve been in that relationship myself, where we haven’t really wanted to have sex. I’ve gone through all that. It’s a horrible place to be.

When kids come along, the relationship isn’t “I love you. Oh my God, I love you, I love your mind.” It’s all about the kids and about work and the division of work. It becomes incredibly un-sensuous. I know this because I’m around our kids all the time. We have three of them now. But we’ve managed to keep things sensual. To a fault. [Laughs.] It’s lovely. It’s still good.

It’s better even. But our relationship’s gotten better as well. I am connected with him. I look forward to having sex and I look forward to seeing him and kissing him and those things, you know. I like the way he smells and lots of things like that. Kind of simple things. That man-woman stuff has lingered since the day we first met, really. He’s very strong about who he is. He always wants sex every night, so it’s just sexy, you know? It just feels natural: Have sex and then sleep. It connects you to something. To life, you know, to something important.

But it’s more than just being turned on by hot, foreign dark guys. [Laughs.] It’s a certain emotional sensibility he has. His emotional instincts are right — about people, about things. He’s much quieter than I am. He’s quite shy. And more. I notice this so much in New York: So many people never consider other people, how they have to struggle to get by. They pass them on the street, lying down on the ground, and they never stop and consider what it’s like, what it means, that they don’t have proper food or a place to stay. These people go around all the time saying, “Oh, I deserve this, or I deserve that.” Hector’s of the other kind. He’s had a hard life. He understands people. He stops and gives money to people. It’s a goodness. He has a goodness in him.

I followed my instincts. I’ve never regretted that. I thought, I can never stay with someone who I don’t have that intimate connection with, that chemistry. It wasn’t like, Oh, I want to have good sex with someone and then marry them. I’m not that naive here. With Hector, it’s the feeling of his being independent, capable and hardworking, the very opposite from my last boyfriend. And the thought of having someone who could look after you — it’s kind of an instinctive thing. Someone who’s responsible — to me it’s a turn-on.

I’m one of those people who things always happened to. I never chose a career. And with this relationship, I wanted it. I created it. It doesn’t matter if it was a good idea or a stupid idea. I wanted to live with this person, have a baby with this person. I’d never dreamed it would last this long. But I hope I grow old with him. Why not let it happen? I thought, “What’s the worst?” The worst is that we don’t stay together.