Frankfurt then Tokyo

Shortly after our return to London we moved to Frankfurt.  I was not all that happy there but we made the most of it.  I quickly got a job with the US Army in the I.G. Farbin Building, at the time the largest building in Europe.  Bruce worked out in Mulheim from which he hid the fact that it used to be a concentration camp!  We bought a little Volkswagen and drove the length and breadth of the country on weekends.  We always were going to museums, art galleries, the Zoo.  

We made a few friends notably Susan Dunthorne, also from Liverpool, who until recently lived with her life partner Bob Sperling in Sweden.  She died of cancer some years ago.  A great loss to me personally.  Also an Italian couple, I have since lost touch with who last I knew were living in Venice.  We had the odd visitor from the UK.

One noteworthy visitor was Uncle Clive.  I suffered from terrible panic attacks in those days so his visit made me very tense.  Anyway I made steak au poivre for dinner and because I felt so shaky I went to bed early.  I was woken out of a deep sleep hearing all these shrieks of laughter coming from the kitchen. I went to see what was going on and there were Clive and my husband, Bruce, both in their underwear doing the dishes and snapping towels at each other’s butts.  That was the first inkling.

Then there was the matter of Douglas.  Douglas had been a friend of Bruce’s since Edinburgh University and they had lived together in Earl’s Court before we moved in together.  Douglas had been his best man at our wedding.  Douglas arrived in Frankfurt with his new wife.  Very pretty English girl he had met in Assam, India while working on a tea plantation.  It was at this time that I went into Frankfurt Krankenhaus to have my appendix out.  I was there for four days.  Bruce never came to visit me.

When I got home I found him very distant and melancholy.  When I pressed him, he burst into tears and said that Douglas had changed and he was a different person and had been mean to him, etc., etc.  At the time I just had no idea what he was talking about but this would be the second incident and in the years to come there would be more to follow.

One of the most difficult things in a marriage is to lose your husband to another woman, more difficult is to lose him to another man and in my case to lose him to a different sexual orientation, one I never suspected - although I should have - but I just never realized.  Inexperience of my own - I did not realize that sex was not spontaneous and infrequent.  

Trips abroad and locally were constant.  He was literally never home.  Now when I look at photographs from those days I see how much attention and how much time he spent with Susan Dunthorne’s boyfriend at the time, Bob Maguire.  It never occurred to me that there might be more to it.  And probably there wasn’t on Bob’s part but there was on Bruce’s.

Soon we were being sent to Thailand and in the last moment it changed to Tokyo.  At that point our marriage had totally unraveled and we spent endless hours in London talking about what we would do.  Usually over a bottle of gin so that we would both end up drunk and crying and apologizing and so we agreed to try again and got all our necessary shots and papers to go to Japan.

We stayed in this God-awful hotel for a number of weeks before we found our flat.  A very modern and well-appointed one bedroom in a high-rise building in Chiyoda-ku overlooking the Royal Palace, surrounded by a moat with black swans.  Quite beautiful.  I loved Tokyo immediately.  From the moment I had sukiyaki and sushi, and sashimi and visited Tsukiji fish market, Japanese food would become and remain my favorite cuisine.

We had decorating decisions to make about our new flat and Bruce had no interest and no heart for it.  I usually did because that is what I like to do but I had no heart for it either.  Meanwhile our German cat, Susu, joined us and we got another one who was a bit mentally retarded, the little Chisai, a Japanese stray.  We were getting more and more involved with Tokyo Amateur Dramatic Company, or TADC.  

We met at first night auditions, an American couple, Nancy and Sandy Rosenblum, from Washington, D.C.  They were from Detroit originally and he was with USIA.  She was a housewife and they had two children, a son Daniel and a daughter, Jane.  They remain friends of mine to this day.  Sandy passed away two years ago.  Nancy lives in Chevy Chase.  Daniel and his wife, Tamima and their two daughters, Hannah and Beryl live in Montclair, New Jersey and Jane, twice divorced and her two dogs lives in Alexandria, Virginia.  Nancy is an actor and even in her mid-70s she still gets work and is still a very attractive woman.

Anyway, we produced numbers of professional quality amateur plays.  We did Thurber and Pfeiffer and Neil Simon and Tom Stoppard.  I was stage manager and marketing person.  I worked full time at McCann Ericson Hakuhodo Advertising and made friends there too.  Too many as I recall.  I was having my little affairs and Bruce was having his and eventually, I moved out.