OCR Text |
Show 553 say the same about my l i f e when i t ' s done." And so we struggled through my f i r s t year of teaching. In the summertime I became i n c r e a s i n g l y aware of distance between Brian and mev I blamed i t onto Brian's continuing nightmares. I blamed i t 'onto my preoccupation with my lawless, free-spirited students. I had encouraged them to think for themselves, had t r i e d to encourage them to use t h e i r creative resources, believing these to be the tools to reshape a degenerate society. But the confusion, r e s u l t of permissiveness or lack of fonn and d e f i n i t i o n , gave r i s e to an unendurable insecurity. There were times when I wanted to leave Brian, wanting to escape to. another man or another l i f e , wanting most of a l l to elude the apocalyptic imminence of Vietnam. It seemed always to hover, a black hole sucking every spark of geuine light into a thirteen thousand-mile tunnel across the Pacific and into desolation. It seemed a t e r r i b l e paradox to me t h a t I had longed for a man who would dedicate himself only to me and to our children. I had wanted someone to c u l t i v a t e me, to f i l l the gap where I believed my f a t h e r should have been. I had searched for someone to bind the two halves of myself together - - and I had believed that Brian was the only man on earth who could do that. While Brian depended on me in a frightening, flop-house way, he was r a r e l y around to f u l f i l l my needs. He was gone much of the time - i f not fishing with Danny, then exploring parts unknown. He quit work the day I s t a r t e d teaching and rarely attended h i s classes at the University. He took l i t t l e interest |