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When I returned to the States from scientific meetings in Europe in 1980, Nina said, "I have something important to tell you." Being very tired, I asked if it couldn't wait until morning. "There won't be any morning," she replied. "I've gone to live with someone else."
She had gone to live with the doctor with whom she had shared her frustrations over the previous year when her patients (she had become a nurse practioner at Yale) died of mysterious ailments. It turned out later that these were AIDS patients before anyone had identified AIDS. For a year she had been coming home from work crying and I had been unable to comfort her, but her partner Moreson, could do so.
In fact, if one looks at the photo below, one of a series that we commissioned from the professional photographer Klemens Kalischer in 1978, there is a sadness in our eyes, as if we knew that our marriage of 13 years at that time was coming to an end. There is also sadness in the photos that we took at a big 40th birthday party at our house in 1979 with many friends, including the doctor that Nina would go to live with and his wife at that time. But I had not wanted to face what was coming, and so when Nina left me in August 1980, I felt quite surprised and even betrayed.
A photo of me and Nina taken by the noted photographer Klemens Kalischer in 1978. Click on photo to enlarge.
Yet I should not have felt surprised. Our marriage had been troubled from the beginning, and it was expressed by Nina's depression after dropping out from the Yale Ph.D. program (as always in a couple, one expresses the emotions for both). I supported her to get a good career as a nurse practitioner, and yet we were not able to give each other all we needed.
And I should not have felt betrayed. If anything, it was I who had betrayed her over the years with numerous liaisons with other women.
Once we were separated, I went back to women I had known in previous years, except a few who had married and moved away. And it was a comedy of errors. With one we had a wonderful time of physical pleasure and two days later, she announced that her boyfriend was so jealous, he had finally proposed to her. I went to vist another, a psychiatrist with a wonderful athletic body, who announced that she was married "to another woman" and could no longer sleep with me, but when we went out to a fine restaurant for dinner, she flirted with the attractive waitress and left with her, leaving me sitting at the table to pay the bill and go home alone. I went to visit another old flame and our sex was so vigorous that my back was severely strained. And on a date with another woman I had known for many years, she announced that Nina's new lover had made a pass at her when she was his patient. And then there was the very attractive divorcee with whom I ended up in heated political arguments after we had sex, she being a right-wing republican and I a revolutionary. It was one thing after another.
It was my back that was the weak point to express my psychological pain. It was further strained after a terrible automobile crash when we were hit broadside at top speed by a stolen car, whose driver then fled the scene. The crash took place in the middle of the night in Harlem when I was ferrying back to Manhattan six of the leading Marxist scholars in the US from a meeting of the Eastern Marxist Scholars Conference in the Bronx. Luckily, no one was severely injured, but the car was totalled. My car was a Checker, built as a taxi with a solid frame like a battle tank, and if it had been anything else, we would have all been killed. Actually I owned two Checkers at that time, but strangely I have no photos of them.
Neither Nina nor I were in a great rush to get divorced and we exchanged friendly letters for several years, before I finally filed for the divorce and arranged it myself, without lawyers, so that I could marry Lindsay.
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