1051 Ask Me - Answer - How Jay and I Met

Tuesday,
December
January 02, 2007

[Later edit - I was so proud of getting the year right! I got the month wrong.]

In entry 1049 I invited questions. So far I've had only one, and it's a very dangerous one. Not dangerous for me, dangerous for you. It happens to be one of my favorite topics, and I could write an entire screenplay about it. It's a very romantic story.

Becs asks how Jay and I met.

In 1983 The Company moved our product group from Poughkeepsie to a new building in Kingston. There was already one department there when the other 250 of us arrived, a group of 8 who had been moved from Texas to Kingston to work on an experimental design.

One day I walked into a friend's office, El, to go to lunch with her, and there was a man sitting in her chair working on her computer. Just as I rounded the corner, he pressed a key, said "Oops", and froze, and the instant I heard his voice I fell in love. He had a soft smooth very deep voice, and the "oops" was pronounced as to rhyme with "coops", and there was something very funny about the way his eyebrows shot up and he froze.

I fell in love before I saw his face. I had a side-rear view. He was so tall that our heads were level while he was sitting and I was standing. His shoulders were, no exaggeration, two feet wide. Soft and fine hair, full short beard, and eyes the color of black coffee. He was wearing a dark three-piece suit, vest and all. He was impressive. The first thing I focused on was a spot at the top of his neck behind his left ear - a spot where the hair was a bit thin and softly curly, a vulnerable spot, and I wanted to touch it. That was the second thing I fell in love with.

El introduced us, and he left. I said to her, "My God! How on earth did I miss that walking the halls!" She said he had moved up with the Texas group, he was the lead designer, so he hadn't been with us in Poughkeepsie, and besides, he was extremely shy and rarely left his office. She said he was the most intelligent and knowledgeable person she'd ever met.

As I've said, I didn't know how to flirt. I wanted to flirt so badly, and I didn't know how without looking foolish. When I asked El who he ate lunch with, she said he probably just took something from the cafeteria back to his office, or got a sandwich from the machines in the hall. So I invited him to have lunch with our usual group of four to six. El or I would go to his office every day and drag him out.

Six weeks after our first meeting, he and I were standing at the bulletin board outside the cafeteria reading about a rafting trip sponsored by the employee club, and he turned to me and asked if Daughter and I would be interested in that. I was so happy, and so excited. Finally! He was asking me out! I said oh yes, we'd love it, and he said "Good. They want four in a raft, so with you two and me and my wife, that makes four."

Wife?

There's something you have to understand about Jay. Much later, when we found out about the Asperger's, it explained a lot. But even back then, it was somehow obvious that you didn't touch Jay. Like when you are looking over a sitting coworker's shoulder, it's natural to put your hand on his shoulder, or when kidding someone, to touch their arm. But there was some kind of silent signal about Jay, a sort of dignity, a pulling back. You didn't touch him. In his last days, when he was blind and bedridden, a coworker visited, and before I took her into the bedroom I told her that she should sit on his right, and put her hand on his right arm so he'd know where she was, and she looked startled, "Touch him? You don't touch Jay! Are you sure it would be ok?"

Likewise, he never spoke of his personal life, and somehow you knew not to ask. So nobody knew he was married.

We went on the raft trip. His wife told me that they were married only a few months, that they had been dating in Texas when his transfer came, so they got married real quick.

And that was the end of that for me. I still loved and admired him, but I gave up on any hope. We were friends. We ate lunch together every day, in the group, for the next seven years. We noticed that he tended to forget time and work very late, so either El or I would stop by his office at quitting time and stand in his doorway until he closed up, and then walk him to his car to make sure he actually left. I noticed that he always called home before leaving, and his wife would tell him what takeout to pick up for dinner. She was a teacher, and off all summer, but apparently she rarely cooked.

He was a technical resource in our product area, and all day there'd be people lined up outside his office waiting for their turn for advice. It was difficult for him to get his own work done. So along about 1987, he started working from my office after lunch. I had a big office with several terminals and worktables. Everybody knew that's where he was, but for some reason, nobody bothered him when he was in my office unless it was an emergency. So for three years we were together from about 11:30 'til 5:30 every day.

And except for once accidentally stepping back into him at the bulletin board one day (and I remember that because instead of stepping back himself, he stepped slightly forward, and we held a five second contact - absolutely remarkable!) we had never, during all that time, so much as touched a sleeve.

In 1990, I'd about had it with some nasty office politics, so when I was offered a transfer to the litigation lab in Poughkeepsie, I accepted the offer. Daughter was 15 then, and Poughkeepsie was a much shorter commute, so it would be good for me both personally and professionally.

Jay hated the telephone as much as I did, but he called me at the litigation lab five, six, seven times a day, whenever he heard or read or thought anything interesting. We missed each other terribly.

About three weeks after the transfer, I heard of a free program at a college about two miles from his house, where they bring in Nobel Prize winners on summer weekends to speak on various science topics, and teachers can get continuing ed credits for attending. They have a preliminary lecture in the morning, serve a free lunch, and then have the main speaker in the afternoon. I mentioned to him that I intended to attend, and that his wife might be interested in picking up a few credits. He said that she'd be bored by the topic, but that he'd like to go.

That weekend, we parked at the same time at opposite ends of the parking lot on campus, and looked up and saw each other. You know the scene in the movies where the two run toward each other in slow motion through a field of daisies? Yeah, just like that, only through a gravel parking lot. When we met, we didn't know what to do. We stood a foot apart and just stared at each other. And then he bent down and kissed me. He tasted of mint toothpaste.

We went to the weekend lectures all summer, but there was no more touching. We often took our lunches outside and sat on a bench and talked.

Three months after my transfer, I happened to be in Kingston for a meeting. El had told me that he had started working very late again, so at 5:30 I stopped at his office to surprise him and drag him out. "Hi! Time to go home! Move it!" He looked up, and his face fell, and he actually teared up. I closed the door and asked what was wrong, and he said that he didn't want to go home, "nobody's there." I asked if his wife was away, and he said "No. She's there. But there's nobody home."

We sat there for a good two hours. He opened up completely. They were living two separate lives. They'd had separate bedrooms since a few weeks after the wedding. He had no idea what she thought any more. He thought she didn't like him, but kept him because he was useful.

We talked a lot after that. I asked him if he wanted to stay married, and he said he had to make it work, that he'd made a commitment. I told him he had to talk about it with her, tell her that he was unhappy. He said he didn't dare, that "she'll punish me." It turned out that whenever he displeased her, she'd get "sick". She was "getting sick" a lot lately, and it was all his fault.

I pushed him into suggesting counselling. She refused until she decided that he was in love with me. Apparently my name turned up a lot. So then she agreed because obviously he needed fixing. Over the next two years, they went through something like six different counsellors. Every time a counsellor suggested that maybe she needed to do something different, she'd decide this one was no good and she'd refuse to go back. The last one (whom Jay stayed with on his own, and then with me, for a few more years) took Jay aside and told him that in her opinion, there was no hope. Either he accepted things as they were, that he would be lonely in his marriage, or he called it quits and got a divorce.

He did. Shocked me. I didn't think he was capable of it. Once he decided that's what he had to do, I admit I worked hard to hold him to that course. I'm not entirely a nice person, I can be self-serving, even if I hate myself for it.

He convinced HER to file for divorce, and he moved into a motel, where he lived for the next two years. When they got the legal separation, that's when Jay and I finally really touched.

I soon discovered something significant. Jay had very bad sleep apnea. He would start snoring very loudly and then stop breathing, and then would go through choking and thrashing before he'd get his breath back. Because his oxygen level would get very low, he had bad night terrors. He was completely unaware of any of it! It's pretty obvious that's why the wife had kicked him out of the bedroom, but she had never said anything to him about it, never told him why.

Me, I'm different. I dragged him to a sleep lab, where they said he had the worst case of apnea they'd ever seen. He stopped breathing 80 times an hour! In three nights of tests, he got no REM sleep, no deep sleep. They didn't see how he could possibly be sane.

He got a CPAP (constant positive airways pressure) machine, and and the snoring and choking stopped. The night terrors took a little longer, but eventually they stopped, too.

Ya gotta give me credit. I told him that this might go a long way toward fixing one of the biggest problems in their marriage. Did he want to try again? He said no, that if he went back to her, not only would things not be any different, she'd punish him for the rest of his life.

The divorce was final in December of 1993, and he and I were married in January 1994.

The brain cancer appeared in October of 1998, and he died in October of 2001.

And that's the story. I guess I could have simply answered that we met in 1983 when we worked together, started dating in (when? 1992?), and married in 1994, but that leaves out so much.

There is a cute side story. When I found out that Jay had feelings for me beyond a strong friendship and a professional respect, I was so amazed and so happy, I told El and one of the other female coworker friends, "Guess what ...!" They both, separately, rolled their eyes at me and said, "So what else is new? You didn't know how he felt about you? Oh, come on! It was so obvious!" It turned out that everyone we knew, everyone we worked with, had figured we'd been sleeping together for years! He and I were the only ones who didn't know how each of us felt about the other.