Modern Love
The Phone That Tore Us Apart
Our long-distance marriage was hard to sustain — and hard to end.
By Patti Niemi
April 12, 2024
What tore us apart was displayed on a table in the courtroom — a phone. As the judge stated for the record, I was appearing for my divorce “telephonically.”
This was 17 years ago, pre-Zoom. From my home in Oakland, Calif., 2,000 miles from the Midwestern courtroom where my husband sat, I pressed the receiver to my ear and heard coughs and murmurs, chairs scraping and doors closing. The judge asked my husband for the date of our marriage. He couldn’t answer.
“Why is it always the man who forgets?” asked the judge.
Someone laughed. (I pictured a bailiff acting like the sidekick on “Judge Judy.”)
“July 19, 1998,” my husband finally said.
We had started dating eight years before that day, as young musicians in a Miami training orchestra. Everybody there had the same goal: to win a position in a permanent orchestra and make music for a living.
More than a job, music was our identity. Auditions are brutal. There are few openings, and it’s not uncommon for 100 players to try out for each. My husband and I faced this likelihood: If we got lucky and won jobs, they would probably be in different cities.
After four years in the orchestra, I won a percussion job with the San Francisco Opera. Some years later, after freelancing in New York, my husband joined an orchestra in the Midwest. Most couples in our situation would break up, but neither of us was willing to choose between job and relationship. So, for six months of every year — the length of my opera season — we committed to a long-distance relationship and eventually a long-distance marriage.
Now that marriage was coming to an end. I tried to picture my husband in the courtroom. It was late October. He would be wearing a light winter jacket, his dark blue one. Was he crying? I doubted it. Unlike me, he had an audience. When musicians are onstage, we hide our feelings. If we play well, we smile and bow. If we play badly, we smile and bow. We have learned to show only the good side.
“You have no minor children?” asked the judge.
“No,” he said.
After Sunday matinees during my season, I often would take BART to the airport and fly east on an overnight flight that was half empty. I learned to book a seat in the back, hoping to lie down. I drank coffee and stumbled through O’Hare, looking for my connecting regional flight.
After 24 hours together, I would leave on Tuesday morning, arriving back in San Francisco in time for rehearsal. On one visit we spent a whole week together — I happened to be with him on 9/11, and it took me five days to get a flight back.
Over the years we established a rhythm. Adding children to the composition didn’t seem possible.
But I was fine with that because we had so much. To fall in love with my husband’s playing was to fall deeply in love with him. I loved his dedication to his art, how all his emotions came through the music. I loved his devotion to his parents and to our ancient kitty, Blackie, about whom he wrote a beautiful eulogy. We were two musicians in tune with each other — we never had to explain performance anxiety or justify the need to practice. He and I loved being together, even if it just meant practicing in the same house.
As the years became a decade and then longer than a decade, “being together” was exactly what we lacked. For half of every year since we left Miami, we had words but not touch; we shared references but not experiences. When his mother had a breakdown and entered the hospital, I was thousands of miles away, as I also was when he and a flute player were victims of an attempted armed robbery as they loaded the car before an early morning gig. He missed my opening night opera the first year, and every year after.
Musicians must be comfortable with solitude — we spend hours by ourselves in practice rooms. But solitude in our personal lives was harder to bear.
In San Francisco I never came home to an empty house. Shortly after moving there, I agreed to house-sit for friends and never left. They became my West Coast family. I was surrounded by the chaos and companionship of three children and two adults. Over the years, I hadn’t seen the isolation building for my husband, the toll taken from years of leaving me at the airport, where each pickup was just a prelude to a drop-off.
Being lonely within a marriage is the worst kind of loneliness. Even for two musicians, sound wasn’t enough. Eventually, the distance just became too much.
Now, back in the courtroom, there was silence. I pictured the judge running down a list, checking boxes. He stated that neither of us was seeking spousal support, that each of us had health insurance. He confirmed that we had divided our assets.
Getting divorced involved a slow-motion unraveling of what we had built. His grandmother’s wedding ring went into my fire safe — I couldn’t envision the logistics of sending it back without crying. Our joint bank account was divided in two. (On the phone to the bank representative I couldn’t even say the word; I said we were “separating.”)
In front of my West Coast house, a FedEx driver unloaded my percussion instruments: snare drums, cymbals, marimba and vibraphone. My ex-husband took custody of all the clarinet music I’d once adored — I stopped going to Peet’s Coffee because Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto was on their playlist, and I couldn’t bear to hear it.
We had only one major asset to divide. Outside a UPS store on Shattuck Avenue, I broke down crying after quitting claim to our home. Five years earlier we had purchased our dream house. The notary’s signature dissolved the dream.
Only 30 minutes had passed since I’d phoned in for my divorce. Our marriage ended at 7 a.m. Pacific Time. My ex left the courtroom, went to the parking garage and called me. Across the miles, we cried together.
I was gutted. He and I had spent summers in Santa Fe, and after our divorce I dreamed of the region’s arroyos — hollows where something had been but no longer was. My house, with its five occupants, was too full of life — I took to driving the streets of Oakland. Alone in my car, I howled.
Night after night I went to work in the pit, a place where opera’s most common theme — love gone wrong — constantly unfolded onstage. Leonora chooses poison over a forced marriage. Madama Butterfly chooses seppuku over spousal humiliation. Senta throws herself into the sea as her Flying Dutchman departs.
The stories didn’t help, but the music did.
One of the operas in our rotation was “Der Rosenkavalier.” Near the end of the opera, the Marschallin and the two young lovers come together to sing about aging, love and loss. Their voices weave together and overlap; the inner lines, struggling to be heard, break through and cross one another. Their bodies resonate together.
In the trio’s final moments — when their voices are soaring, each stretching to reach higher than the others’ — there is so much resistance and conflict between them that we ache for resolution. When the music finally resolves, so do the relationships, and the older woman, with quiet dignity, steps aside.
Over time, grief, like music, modulates. A divorced couple is lucky if each person finds a separate peace. Harmony, though, requires two voices.
In the early years after our divorce, my ex and I still talked every day. We couldn’t let go of that connection. It was a habit, a comfort; we needed each other’s voice. During the opera’s intermissions, I would climb the stairs from the basement to find a private place to call him, leaving the sounds of the opera behind. Cellphone to my ear, my ex and I would discuss music, maestros, colleagues.
A few years later, we talked about Al and Tipper Gore, who had just announced their separation. “It’s sad,” I said. “They were married 40 years. But I guess it’s sadder to stay married and be unhappy.”
“It’s overrated,” my ex said.
“What is?” I asked. “Marriage or divorce?”
“Happiness,” he said.
Across the miles we laughed, together.
As a married couple, our voices hadn’t been enough. For two people reeling after a divorce, however, the phone had become a lifeline, a gentle landing as we eased our way into our new, separate lives.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/12/styl ... apart.html