I’ve heard that everyone is a hero in their own story.  I have a few stories in which I am not the hero.  In this story my mitigation is that I was young and stupid.

Most of the photos in this roll are of Marian Pierce in September 1980. 

A month earlier my wife Janet told me that she was leaving our marriage so that she could pursue a relationship with her married professor of marriage counseling, Craig Wunderlich.  (I googled him to see what he was doing a few years ago.  I learned that he was heading a therapy office in Arizona dedicated to helping people who had been dumped by their spouses.)

This devastated me.  Looking back on it I can explain it better.  At the time I had no clue.  I believe that much of the dysfunction in my life derives from my attachment disorder.  I was a good little prodigy so my parents let me raise myself.  I was raised to have no needs.  When I became an adult I had little idea as to what made me, myself, happy.  Instead I made others happy, enjoying their joy and getting my happiness reflected in their eyes. 

When I met Janet she was extremely shy.  She was also extremely pretty.  She hated getting attention as the pretty girl.  She was also self-critical.  She didn’t think that she was worth loving.  At the time I explained it to myself that people have their own cup of self-value.  The self-value is replenished through positive social interaction.  Janet’s cup had a hole in the bottom.  The trajectory of our relationship was that I helped fill that hole while replenishing the cup, to try to help her understand that she was a beautiful person in addition to being pretty.  Eventually she learned not to need me.  And when she no longer needed me, she no longer needed me.

Because my marriage was the foundation of my existence, losing the marriage left me undone. 

I did not date much before Janet.  I’ll probably discuss this when it arises, or not, in the photographs.  I dated no one other than Janet from October 1974.  Janet also did not like it much when I had women friends.  When she left, I noticed that nearly all of my women friends were lesbian.  They were safe to Janet.  One of the few exceptions was Marian Pierce, who was also one of Janet’s friends.

I met Marian when she moved into the same co-op house as I lived, in a room she got because Janet had moved out.  Janet and shared a room in Small House.  In the spring of 1979 Janet decided that she wanted to stay married, but live alone for awhile.  We moved back in together the following January and stayed married for another 7 ½ months.

Marian was and is brilliant.  She was always fascinating conversation.

A month after Janet left, Marian mentioned that she was studying the architect Louis Sullivan and that there was one of his buildings in Grinnell, Iowa, about 60 miles west.  I told her that I knew the building and that we should take the bus to go see it.

We did.  We went to see one of Louis Sullivan’s “Jewel Box” banks.  The bank employees were happy to show it off.  The town librarian suggested we go look at a MidCentury Modern house at the north end of town.  We still had time before the bus back to Iowa City.  I called Anne Six who was attending college in Grinnell.  I’ve palled around with her brother Allan since 1972.  It turned out that her parents were there and she invited us to a dinner party.  She was going to make the deep dish pizza from the Vegetarian Epicure cookbook for the first time.  I had made it many times before, so I helped out.

We went from there to an after-party in an apartment downtown.  Years later Mark Kannowski would occupy that same apartment when he was a math instructor at Grinnell.  The bus stop was almost across the street.

The bus was on time.  Maybe around midnight.  After Marian and I got settled in adjoining seats towards the back a man walked up to me and asked if I’d like to buy some acid.  I asked him if he’d buy acid from a stranger on a Greyhound bus.  He said, “No,” and the people around us laughed.

The bus came into Iowa City from I-80 on Dubuque Street.  My Linn Street boarding house was two blocks away from a stoplight on Dubuque.  I suggested to Marian that we ask the driver to drop us off there, and she could spend the night at my place rather than our walking her back to her place a mile west of the bus terminal.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I awoke to a much more intimate relationship than I’d sought.  I was in over my head.  I really liked Marian.  I didn’t know what to do. 

These photos of Marian also depict my chaos and my ambiguity about our relationship.  I hope they also show her intelligence and beauty.

The intimacy did not last long.  I ended it very clumsily and rather hurtfully.  Marian and I continued in our friendship, fortunately.  She’s now a renowned writer.  Her prose is magically realistic, or realistically magical. 

Sadly Janet punished Marian for this.  Janet also mistakenly believed that I was using Marian as a tool against her, to get back at her.  Instead I was being stupid and corrosive. 

The photos discussed in this essay can be found in the Photos by Number section in gallery 00044.