Robin

Robin was an entire story — no, saga. In fact, I turned our relationship into a short story, "This Will Only Hurt For a Moment," which has only been published in UITNODIGING TOT MOORD, a Dutch collection of 18 of my stories. Here's the highlights, though:

I met Robin in Pittsburgh, while I was visiting my friend Doug's brother Mike to break my drive home to Long Island from Ann Arbor for Christmas vacation, 1970. Robin and I met at a pajama party, and I wound up spending a week in Pittsburgh instead of only one night, and she left her husband and came to New York and stayed at my parents' house with me (my parents were in Florida) for a week, and then I took her back to her parents' house in New Jersey so she could wait out the six months' separation required for a New Jersey divorce, but then she came to Ann Arbor and moved in with my roommate, Nobuyuki Albert Sato, and me on Oakland, but she only stayed a couple of weeks, and then she got religion and went back to her husband Michael.

Two years later, my sister was visiting me in my tiny studio apartment — still in Ann Arbor — and the phone rang in the middle of the night, and it was Robin; she wound up coming out to visit me, just before Thanksgiving 1972, with her infant son, Thane, and we slept together on my rollout sofa/bed, and she decided to leave Michael again and move to Ann Arbor, but not in with me this time, this time she'd live on her own, and we'd see each other and be friends, and then, when her divorce came through, we'd see what we saw, so she drove off with Thane and I never saw her again.

Except I did, because I came out of the est Guest Seminar Leaders' Program with a determination to "complete my incomplete relationships," so I wrote to the Alumni Office at Pitt and they gave me an address for Michael, and I wrote to her at that address, and, in February of 1980, as Rudi and I were driving from Frankfort down to Greece, after my little interlude with Beth, I called Lydia and learned that I'd gotten a letter from a Robin with a last name I didn't recognize, which turned out to be Robin's divorced-and-remarried name. And we corresponded for like two years, and then in '85 we actually spent a week in New York City together, when I was in town from Germany for a Mystery Writers of America awards banquet in April. That was the first time we'd seen each other since November, 1972, more than 13 year earlier, and it was pretty amazing.

When I got back to Germany, Robin called me and told me that she wanted to leave her second husband and second and third sons and come live with me in Europe — and I told her no, don't do that, and that was finally the end.

(November 24, 1993)