Notes

My beloved Ayako understood her good fortune. A teaching job. In Portland. Sure, no one at Smith had heard of the fourth tier college where she might – if the stars aligned and she managed to be lucky and perfect – might get tenure but it was a real job. A good job. Teaching classes that mattered. After years of economic insecurity any job felt like a comforting blanket and this was a job in a city where everyone wanted to be. Where she wanted to be. Close to her parent's in Seattle but not so close that their weighty expectations would swamp the kayak of her brand new life.

Portland wasn't perfect. It was 4847 miles from Tokyo and her adopted tribe. It was closer to the perfect apartment and the perfect neighborhood she left behind in New York City but both cities felt like distant dreams with faraway soundtracks. Portland was melancholy music and an empty apartment.

Portland sounded not so much like the sad Indy rock it made famous (“Did Indy rock made Portland famous or was it the other way around? Ayako wasn't sure.”) it sounded like Schubert's String Quintet in C, 'Adagio' and not in a good way. The city felt gray even though it was fall and the weather was kind of perfect as she paced herself up 13 miles Leif Erickson trail—determined not to let her outsized introversion keep her inside.

Being involuntarily alone bothered her. It was all well and good to know that there were humans to text and old flames to fan on social media and, sure, Ayako craved solitude more than sex many nights but Portland was a loveless tableau rosa. Martin wrote his name on the blank slate and changed all that. He came with the promise of family and community. And his body felt so very good. Safe.

Sex she could get. Slutty and unashamed she attracted humans of every orientation, body, hue and character but sex with Martin seemed like a door into a long-sought world. They shared a queer sensibility about relationships and the world. Their poly was supposed to be the kind of poly where everyone participated as equals. The promise of feminist freedom unshackled from the rote rules perpetrated by marriage and unconsciously imitated by most couplings of all kinds.

Martin was married.

The wife held her arms open wide to my beloved and it felt good to have a sense of doumo, a grateful welcoming, in the new city. Ayako was wise to the perils of being a unicorn. The generous hospitality gave her a spot to be unguarded. She opened her heart. She let him into places she had permitted no other lover. She submitted to him.

She did not submit to Carolyn. At first the fierce professor held open every kind of possibility with this woman. How else does one go where few have gone before? The marriage precluded possibilities. The two of them operated with a familiar set of meets and bounds, a blueprint worked out in too many expensive couple's therapy sessions, and Ayako mistook the good words for good intentions.

The words were good. So good. She would be a part of a family. She would be an equal. Her voice would be respected. She craved the family part. The child was fine. Spoiled maybe but having a kid around lent credibility to the promises which seemed to flow like so much box wine. They could do this. Everyone wanted it. Everyone was willing to sacrifice in order to have it.

It felt good to let him inside of her. He was a gentle lover. Considerate. Not the best top but talented enough and too frail to push her very quickly or very far. Instead he pushed aside other boundaries. She took him to Japan. Just because they said “I love you.” and he had money, the wife's money, Ayako took him to her home and showed him the most precious parts.

He proved vastly unworthy of Nihon. Sometimes the line between inability and unwillingness gets tangled and things turned quickly into a clusterfuck of knots. Ayako tried to convince the couple to leave the preordained script and listen to her voice as a worthwhile participant in the human drama of this lives but they cared only about their own psychodrama. She was a bit player in it. A minor character.

Ayako had patiently and carefully tried to explain both her need for amae and why such a state of belonging was universal and desirable and, yes, better than than reflexive western heteronormative patterns Martin eschewed and then turned to ape with Carolyn. Furious with the couple's unwillingness to follow through with the promises they made over and over Ayako ended the love affair.

She had been heartbroken before. Often even. Such is the nature of human existence. This betrayal burned differently. It wasn't born of fallibility. Martin hadn't been inept at maintaining their fire after the inevitable end of new relationship energy. He hadn't been sloppy with the calendar nor forgetful of her appetite for reassurance and sex play. He and Carolyn deliberately made serious life-consequently promises they had no intention of keeping.

Other than ongoing good will, community standing, relationship recycling and a mutual interest in closure polyamorous relationships have no forum for terminal processing the way that every marriage, no matter how trivial, must show up in Court and have a state-sponsored review. Ayako knew this and thought her paramour (“What a ridiculous word!” she sighed angrily.") would avail himself of a chance to process what had really happened between the three of them.

They retreated to their marriage and their money. The lawsuit shook them loose. Yes, my beloved Ayako knew the odds were impossibly long. Yes, she knew that putting the truth onto paper was a process so fallible and flawed that no one ever won. Justice was only darkly approximated in American family court on those court's very best days. She knew also that the law guaranteed her a chance to talk to them about real things and that the process would require them to show up for mediation. They did. Their lawyer explained how they had to and it did not go well.

Ayako did not prevail. No property rights. And many of the novel claims, born from a session called “Unicorn Rising” at the April 2018 Solo Polyamory Conference in Seattle were shunted aside perfunctorily. The Court curiously granted her request to spend an hour a week with the daughter. The Court did not assess fees. Carolyn furiously appealed and her well-financed anger changed the world forever.

Takamori sets out a set of circumstances wherein an unmarried person in a committed relationship can recover financially for the emotional labor expended to further that relationship. It was a case of first impression in the United States. The bar it set did not afford my beloved any rights. The matter was reversed and remanded for further consideration.