Without a Doubt - [75]

At first Gaby was gung-ho. We’d go a few nights a week, although we ended up taking different classes. For me the experience was interesting, though not earthshaking. Scientology, as I saw it, was really kind of a ragbag of truisms from the world’s great religions. But Gaby’s spirits seemed to be improving. After only three or four weeks, however, I heard that he was close to getting thrown out. Apparently, he’d been hitting on the women in his classes and they didn’t appreciate it. They complained to the supervisors, and Gaby was put on notice that he’d have to clean up his act or get out.

That did it for me. I realized right then and there that I couldn’t waste my life if he wasn’t going to get serious about his.

It was around that time that I met the man who would become my second husband.

I’d gone down to the church’s administrative offices to sign up for a new set of courses. A pleasant young man was assigned to help me. His name was Gordon Clark.

“What’s your job?” he asked me.

I told him I was a lawyer. I wanted courses that would stress interpersonal relations. I was looking for something that would help me to size people up and evaluate them from an attorney’s point of view.

Gordon cracked a joke or two about lawyers, something I’d gotten used to during the year since I’d passed the bar. The conversation wound its way around to ourselves. I learned that Gordon was an officer in the church. He lived right in church housing and worked twelve- to fourteen-hour days. He lived, breathed, and ate Scientology. He also seemed very upbeat, not just about Scientology, but about life in general. I responded to his energy and enthusiasm and to what I took at the time to be spirituality. I came away from our first meeting feeling lighter than I had in years. It was just the way a person should feel, I told myself. Happier, lighter, focused upon the betterment of the self instead of on an unending quest for big scores and fast times.

I knew that I was attracted to Gordon Clark. And I could tell he was attracted to me. I suppose anyone looking at us from the sidelines could tell what a mismatch this was. For one thing, I was a twenty-six-year-old attorney. He was a twenty-two-year-old without a college degree. But he seemed to hold out the promise of happiness. I looked at him and I saw, or thought I saw, stability.

I knew what I had to do and I steeled myself to do it. One evening, I waited for Gaby to come home. I wasn’t nervous or frightened. I was sitting on the stairs and he was in the living room below me. He started to discuss a trip we’d been planning to take to Monte Carlo, where he was to play in a backgammon tournament.

“Gaby, I’m not going to Monte Carlo with you,” I told him.

“What are you talking about?” he asked me, mildly exasperated. “It’s all planned.”

“I’m not going,” I told him in a voice so calm it surprised even me. “Gaby, I want to get a divorce.”

He stared at me in silence for a few seconds. Ordinarily there would have been blame-swapping, finger-pointing intended to intimidate me. Instead, I found calm acceptance.

“Can’t you give me another chance?” he asked.

“No, Gaby. It’s too late, I just want a divorce.”

It was over. We both knew it.

There was one small problem. I had no place to go. I had no money. I could have gone after community property, but all I wanted was out. The sentiment was noble-but hardly practical, given my current circumstances.

I was in between jobs and on unemployment. And the nine-month grace period on my student loan repayment had expired several months before. I’d thought Gaby was making those payments, but shortly after I moved out, I learned that he hadn’t paid a dime; I was several months in arrears. That nonpayment had been reported to all the credit agencies, so I had no credit cards and no way to get one. I couldn’t have passed a credit check even if I’d been able to afford an apartment. How could a woman with a law degree be so helpless?

Luckily, friends of mine knew a man who was converting some apartments into condominiums. He agreed to let me stay in one rent-free for a month or two until I could get on my feet. I packed up my clothes. Gaby gave me an old TV and I moved out. I wrote the bank a letter explaining that I was going through a rough period and that I had no intention of defaulting on my student loan. I assured some faceless bank official that as soon as I was employed I would catch up on the delinquent payments and make all future ones on time. I made good on that promise. After a year of timely payments, I wrote another letter to the bank asking them to clear my credit rating. And to my surprise, they did. (If whoever was responsible for that act of kindness is reading this, I’d like to say thank you. That gesture meant more to me than I can properly express. It didn’t just boost my credit rating, it was a vote of confidence.) Someone had cared enough to look past the data sheet and see that I might actually shape up to be a responsible member of society.

When I left Gaby, however, I was destitute. In spite of that, I was happy. I felt I might actually be able to make it out on my own. Not long after moving out I landed a job with the law firm of Brody and Price doing defense work. I loved my colleagues. They were wonderful, ethical people. I was well on my way to making it on my own. And yet within three months, I was married to Gordon Clark. How did that happen?