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Letʻs add “astrology” to the list of things I know to be true but do not believe in.
I have spent years trying to find a rational explanation for the preponderance of significant Scorpios in my life.
One article claims Leo, Cancer and Virgo are the most common zodiac signs based on U.S. birth data. Others say that Scorpio is the most common at 9.6% of the population with Virgo at 9.4%. If that’s true, I should have almost as many Virgo friends as Scorpio friends, and I can only think of one significant Virgo. Statistics aside, most expert sources claim Aries are not super compatible with Scorpio or Pisces – and yet those would be the two most common signs among my close friends and lovers.
I discovered the Scorpio thing in 1982 in a meeting with my dissertation committee near the end of the Ph.D. process. I proposed our next meeting for a date in the last week of October. One committee member responded,”Thatʻs my birthday!” and three more chimed in, “My birthday is that week too!” Four out of my five committee members, carefully chosen as meaningful mentors to me, had their birthdays in the last week of October. My BFFʻs birthday is November 1 and her husband is also a later Scorpio. So was the man in the breakup that inspired my year of poems. The list goes on from there.
Given this pattern, it was not particularly surprising to me to discover that Velvalee was a Scorpio. One day, talking about how much longer she would stay in New York, she mentioned wanting to be back in Oklahoma to celebrate her upcoming 50th birthday with her family. “Whenʻs your birthday?” I asked. “October 29th,” she replied. This time I didnʻt completely hit the floor, but my jaw did.
“You turn 50 on October 29th this year?,” I asked again, just to be sure I had heard right. Velvalee nodded. “So does Nelson!” I exclaimed wide-eyed. “I am sleeping in two apartments in New York City, and in each of those apartments the other person was born on October 29, 1944,” I concluded. Intense for sure. Even weirder knowing that I had met my Brazilian same-day-same-year “birthday twin” when I got off the airplane in São Paulo in 1992. I did not know what to make of it. Not sure I do yet. But the omens were pointing to something.
As summer turned to fall in New York, my initial time with Velvalee was coming to an end – and it felt like my time with Nelson was as well. There is a point in every romantic relationship where the two of you must decide to lean in through the uncomfortable stuff, through learning to argue and fight fair, through disappointing one another and forgiving, and especially, as two mature adults with a complex set of commitments and ambitions, through negotiating the friction of defining your place in each other’s full lives. Or, if there is not enough of a reason to design a future together, you begin to lean out. After a year, Nel and I were hitting that point.
I knew some of the landmines in our relationship. Nelson delighted in telling stories of how his middle daughter would go to great lengths to drive off girlfriends she didn’t like - which was most of them. He asserted that he planned to never return to live in Brazil – but I didn’t really believe that. His closeness to his parents and his daughters (which meant to eventual grandchildren) would make for a strong pull. I could be starting a new phase in my life and theoretically I was free to do that anywhere – but in Brazil no matter how successful I became, any success of mine would be viewed under the shadow of his fame.
It began to unravel on a trip to Rio. One night I was tired and raised my voice, he responded in kind – our first loud fight and unfortunately it was a public one. It was over in a flash, but it felt like lightning that had split something in two. A few days later I was going out into a chilly (for Rio) winter afternoon and did not have a layer for warmth. I asked the live-in maid Mari whether she thought Nel’s daughter would mind if I borrowed a sweater. I borrowed one, leaving an apologetic explanatory note. It seemed natural to me - women share clothes all the time.
Oops, I should have remembered the cautionary tales! Before I returned a few hours later, the daughter had gone to her father with a story of major violation, and rather than negotiate a truce and an accepted apology, he simply took her side. Then, perhaps feeling the tension in the apartment, one afternoon the fluffy pampered cat took a flying leap from the other end of the sofa, clawing my face. Mari ran to the pharmacy for antibiotics, warning me she had already suffered a case of cat scratch fever from a similar attack. Nelson was shockingly apathetic; he shrugged and took the cat’s side.
I retreated to New York, where Velvalee once again put her healing hands on me, reducing a lump on my left cheek just below my eye from the size and color of a small plum to a small faint bruise. Still, I looked like a battered woman and felt a bit battered inside. I’m not one who gives up on relationships easily, rarely the one to make the first move. It was soon thereafter that he initiated the The Talk. The landing was gentle. There were still a few Sunday trips to Harlem. His mention of our breakup, in a 50th birthday interview in the Brazilian edition of Playboy magazine, was kind.
That doesn’t mean I did not hurt. I had opened my heart, as I had done before with other men and would do again, and so it hurt. Not in a way that took me a year of writing poetry to resolve; there was not a single poem and within a couple of months I was dating again. And yet, over the next few years the thought of my time with Nelsinho could bring on intense feelings, both of sadness and gratitude. Eventually my memory of the relationship distilled down to simple appreciation; it was a kind of touchstone. I sometimes even described our affair as a “great love of my life” which also made no sense to me even as I said it, given its short duration compared with my two marriages, neither of which I describe with those words.
It is only now, thirty years, a lot of reflection on my relationship history, and some good post-divorce therapy later, that I understand the significance of this man and this caso sério, what it was trying to teach me. Nelson was a template for the kind of the man I should be with but at some deep level have not believed I deserve.
Not his height and build and ethnicity nor his preference for cats not dogs, for daughters not sons, the bullet points on a dating app profile. What I treasure is why I leaned in the first time I thought about breaking up: our shared values; our shared commitment to use our talents to take care of our larger communities and world, our loyalty to our family and friends; our capacity to make cherished friends across social, racial, ethnic and any other perceived differences and humbly use our privilege in service as their allies; our shared need to live a spiritually rich life. The way in which he is drawn to strong independent women and does not insist that they diminish themselves in the way institutionalized as “marriage.” His ability at once to be humble but not to diminish himself either; his commitment to take a stand and be a meaningful voice in the world. All other things aside, Nelson was a man with whom I would never get bored, a man who would expect me to do extraordinary things.
And yet, apparently Belisa had it right in that first magazine photo caption. As Nelson tells our story, I was nothing more than his latest conquest.
Both these stories, and many others, can be true. The beauty of being a writer is that we can take the same ingredients and like a skilled chef create a multitude of dishes. Complex and refined; comfort food; total junk. The choice is ours as we make sense of our histories, whether we write them in published memoir or live them forward.
My hope as I stir these stories and pop them in the oven is that they may nourish those who hear them. Or at least produce a good laugh. Even a mess of a fallen cake sometimes tastes totally delicious and makes for an oft-repeated tale after a hundred perfect ones are forgotten.