Two Five Two: Beliefs 2

I have this from the same girl I wrote about earlier in the month, the girl who was supposed to be going to Pitcairn Island and Patagonia and Lhasa and Victoria Falls this year.

She told me this back in June 2016--- three years ago now. She'd vanished for a while at the end of 2014 and stayed amongst the missing pretty much all through 2015. And then she messaged me one night to tell me this:

I  have a few stories to tell!  I decided this morning that, fuck it, it's time!  I have a confession for you. I got married last year... It was such a whirlwind, running into him in Auckland when i was there for a long weekend, then spending every waking moment together, a proposal in Taupo, then married a month later!

It really was crazy... I didn't tell anybody. No one in my family knows, a couple of friends, that's all. It was never going to work long-term. and i knew that. he was a brilliant first husband though.

I was amazed at the story. She'd told me before she vanished that she'd flown north on a concert weekend and run into an old flame at a hotel bar. I'd thought she might be living with someone. But this was a confession worth following up. I did raise an eyebrow at the initial message--- a whirlwind marriage was one thing; a secret marriage was another. Just how would that work? How would she avoid telling family? How would she avoid telling HR at work? Wouldn't there be tax forms to change? How would she keep friends from spreading the story?

She told me more later--- that she'd recognized very early that the marriage wouldn't work, and they hadn't lived together for much of the time. She'd kept the house she was renting (or owned...which is another story) and went back and forth with her Golden Retriever from one house to the other. I might've have understood if she'd leased out (or sublet) her old house, but she was clear that she'd kept her house all for herself.

She never did tell me about any divorce. I looked up divorce law in the Land of the Long White Cloud, of course. It's a simple procedure, and inexpensive. You can get an order of dissolution if you've been separated for two years and apply for an order. The fee is something like $NZ 215.00. Which raises the question of whether she ever got a divorce and, if so, when? If they'd agreed to count the start of living separate and apart sometime early in 2015, one or the other of them could've applied for a dissolution order in 2017. She never mentioned it, never mentioned any divorce or any proceedings. I did think about so many questions. If he did indeed have (as she insisted) $10 million in the bank, wouldn't there inevitably have been a pre-nup? Were there community property issues? The purported husband was a successful businessman,  which to my mind means that there would've been lawyers telling him that he needed to protect himself. But she never talked about any divorce or any aftermath.

So here we have another story, and one that strikes me now as deeply suspect. Moving in with someone after a whirlwind romance is one thing. A marriage where one party has ten million ($US? $NZ?) in the bank is something else altogether. And a divorce, however amicable, isn't just something one forgets. She'd have been twenty-nine or thirty when all this supposedly happened--- and a chartered accountant. She'd know how these things work, and known the legal and tax ramifications...and so would any husband's lawyers.

My blonde friend in Wellington is like me: we both grew up living inside books and stories. We've always wanted our lives to be crafted and shaped like stories. I can understand her longing for a doomed whirlwind romance and marriage. A bittersweet tale to tell later. I can understand all that. But what if she can't escape the stories she's crafted in her head? What if she made up a brief marriage just as I believe she made up trips to Buenos Aires and Mt. Fuji and Shanghai? How do I ever ask her?

I'd like to think that someone reading this out over the aether will have thoughts....