Space Between the Stars (35 page)

transferred from Dominican University to Mills College in Oakland, where I attended classes with radical feminists and strong-minded women who lived as they thought. Most of the women in my classes lived in the East Bay or San Francisco, and I saw how antiseptic and one-dimensional my life in Marin was. We studied New York Puerto Rican Nicholasa Mohr's book
Rituals of Survival;
her writing gave a cultural perspective of life in New York and expressed anger at the racism and classism she experienced. The electricity in class discussions made my Dominican days seem like kindergarten. I stretched my boundaries as a womanist and strove to develop more personal autonomy and independence.

In March, Cheryl McHale, our bookkeeper, told me I had to learn to read our general ledger. When I asked her why, she said once I would see the numbers, I would understand. Cheryl worked at our house every Thursday, and we spent a couple of hours each week going through our general ledger line by line.
Rina Medrano, a lovely woman from El Salvador, lived with our family Monday through Friday helping with chores and the children, allowing me time to sit down at the kitchen table, poring over our financial records. Besides the Santana Band, office staff, and crew salaries, there was insurance, office rent, bills from lawyers, accountants, publicist, travel agent, concert booking agency fees, and our personal expenses. Since 1973 the accountants had paid our business bills and managed our finances. I thought I knew, participated in, and understood our company and its functions because we had quarterly financial meetings and I read the quarterly reports as well as the weekly accountings of disbursements. But reading the ledgers—seeing every penny we spent—I realized I did not have all the information. I saw quite clearly that we could not maintain our lifestyle for much longer. Our investments were meager compared to our expenses. It was obvious that we needed to change our planning process for the health of our company and for the security of our family.

Carlos was in Asia touring at the time, and I told him by phone what I had found and my next plan of action. He believed I would act as wisely as possible, as he had always trusted me to interpret our business affairs to him. His grueling touring schedule and recording took all of his creative and physical energy. Yet our financial situation was suddenly a matter of equal urgency, so I kept him informed daily. Cheryl suggested I call our accountant's office and ask them to send all of our files to our house. In a few days, fifty file-storage boxes were delivered to our garage. The four-foot-long cardboard files held twenty-one years of Carlos's and my financial history—receipts, tax
returns, general ledgers, corporation records, concert settlements, royalty statements—all that would give me an understanding of our history and provide a foundation for planning for the future.

It was a miracle we had Cheryl: She had filed half the documents when she worked for the accountants. Because she was impeccable in her work, I had hired her as our personal bookkeeper when she left her job at the accounting firm. She began the daunting task of organizing the documents and extracting pertinent financial files we needed to glean information about our livelihood. She was a perfectionist who did everything according to government regulations and tax laws—as well as her own dedication to honesty—and we sat together on the floor tackling the hundreds of sheets of paper in each box.

Day in and day out, often until late at night, we worked. What I thought I knew about the Santana Band business and our personal finances was minuscule compared to all that was entailed in running the corporation and our personal lives. I had had no involvement with our insurance coverage—health, dental, workers' compensation, homeowner's, equipment floaters for touring, life insurance—and its complexity and expense was mind-boggling. Our taxes were filed in every state the band played in. But all of that was relatively in order and just needed review and comparative cost investigation. The real problem we discovered was Carlos's royalties. We had recently retained an auditor whose findings showed that we had a claim against Carlos's record label of more than $4 million for ten years. Legally we could file a claim only for the most recent three years, which was $1.2 million according to the auditor. I had had no idea that
Carlos's contract, as with any record company, had a statute of limitations of three years for audit claims. We were told that we could expect the record company to pay no more than 40 percent of our claim for the three years. Carlos and I struggled to cope with the enormity of this financial loss. I blamed myself for not having known how the royalty system worked; Carlos was furious that this could have occurred.

Outside our kitchen windows, thousands of bright orange poppies sprouted among rosebushes—glorious hues of pink, yellow, and peach—in the backyard. Intoxicatingly sweet narcissus competed with the fragrance of star jasmine climbing up the side of the house. Cheryl and I would leave our files to sit outside and eat lunch, inhaling the April blooms that were re-birthing Marin. We lived on soup-size mugs of English Breakfast tea every afternoon. Salvador was eleven and busy with school-work and practicing the piano, imitating Thelonious Monk's wild style. Stella was nine, and she adeptly answered the phone, relaying messages to us in a businesslike voice. Jelli, four years old, played around our papers, her toys and dolls falling into the boxes; or, she sat at the computer playing math games. The children became part of our work and helped however they could, if only by being quiet so we could think.

Ultimately, we recovered what we could in record royalties. It was much less than what we had hoped, but we realized that we could not afford to dwell on the past or become mired in regrets about what had occurred. Instead, we decided to put our energy into the business going forward. As part of this effort, we decided to end our relationships with our outside business managers and accountants. By assuming complete control,
we knew we could be confident that our business would be operated exactly as we wanted.

I held meetings with our employees to let them know how and why we were making changes and to hear their perspectives, as well as to tell them how we desired to go forward as a business. I hired a career counselor who worked with all of us to restructure our communication, and she helped staff work through the areas where they had not previously been accustomed to discussing business with Carlos and me. I found and purchased a building to move our office to, and interviewed applicants for an office manager position. I hired a general contractor to remodel the space for offices, and tried to cook and eat dinners with the children while Carlos toured Europe and the States.

In August—the time of year I adore in Marin—temperatures rose to the eighties; and at night, unseen tropical birds cawed loud cries that sounded as though we were in a rain forest. Afternoons, Rina filled up the wading pool, the children jumped in and out dumping water on the flowers from their plastic pails, and the dogs chased each other across the lawn. In the five months since we had taken over the business, I was working twelve hours a day as chief operations officer, signing every check—of which there were hundreds each month— monitoring insurance, tours, and Carlos's calendar. Not only was it a job, it was also our personal lives and an investment in our future and in our family.

At the end of the month, I was cleaning Carlos's studio in preparation for his return home from the road. I dusted the bookshelves and my cloth swept a small stack of color photos
onto the floor. The glossy images revealed three Asian women with lithe bodies, long black hair falling over their shoulders, and dark, sultry eyes. Carlos was in a couple of the pictures.
Who had taken the photos, and why?
There was nothing risqué or outwardly abnormal in the photos, but with one look I knew Carlos was not living on the road with integrity toward our marriage. My spirit collapsed under the weight of knowing. Carlos's infidelity diminished my view of myself. I was unable to look at it as being about him, and I assumed his conduct had something to do with me.

I picked up the photos and carried them back to the house. In my office, I wrote a letter to Carlos telling him of my devastation, and sealed the photos in an envelope with my words. I filled out a Federal Express form and mailed my broken heart to Carlos. Feeling disconnected and in shock, I sat at my desk, staring into the garden. Salvador's giggles rang from downstairs; I heard Stella singing and then Jelli saying, “Up, up,” to Rina.
What will we do? Where will we go? How can Carlos reject us, his family?

I had a meeting scheduled with a prospective designer in one hour at the new office space. Smiling and hugging the children good-bye, I picked up my car keys and purse and drove to the office. I conducted the meeting, asking the designer's ideas for furnishings, paint, and carpet, barely surviving the hour of acting businesslike. I got back in my car and drove around Marin, looking at neighborhoods to see where I would want to live with my children. This was my answer to being so hurt that I could not even look in the mirror: Keep busy, make a new home, try to stay alive.
Carlos called as soon as he received the package. All he could say was, “I'm sorry.” It was not enough. I had no idea at the time how afraid he was, how exposed in the life he'd kept secret from me. I moved the business into the new office building and concentrated on the children while rebuilding our management company. When Carlos came home, I was withdrawn and angry, ready to snap. We tried to talk, but his explanation of the photos struck me as feeble: He said that other women did not mean anything to him. It was just a physical release; I was whom he loved.

Love meant something very different to me—it meant commitment to one person and being devoid of desire for someone else because of feeling complete inside. I did not need attention from men to make me feel worthy as a person; my marriage was enough, and my children were my treasures. It was unfair for Carlos to live as though he were single and not tell me who he was, that this “release” was important to him. I could have made my own decision about staying in our relationship if I had known the truth.

My needs were so different from Carlos's. Trust and loyalty were part of my existence.
How could I ever trust him again?
Hours and hours of talking and trying to figure it out with my mind just made me crazy. Staying busy did not resolve the bitterness I felt at his infidelity. My anger almost destroyed us. I knew Carlos's struggle was graver than what it appeared to be. Really, all brokenness is a lack of oneness with one's own spirit and light. The real mountains to climb were my anguish and Carlos's confusion and lack of understanding that marriage—
or even great love—must be treasured and honored on every level if it is to last. It took months for us to talk through the elements of the issue: what I wanted from marriage; the sacred unity of husband and wife; why Carlos felt he needed or desired sex outside of marriage; and my point that he would feel as betrayed as I did if I had lived as he had. He pleaded with me to not give up on him, but to work together on our marriage. At times the effort was so exhausting that I thought I should run away from the problems, with the children, and start anew. The solution seemed so simple to me: Live with honesty and integrity. But I had come from a strong home with parents who talked to Kitsaun and me and gave us spiritual values on which to build our lives. Carlos's parents had tried to give their children the best they had; but Carlos had gained a much different set of values from seeing his dad stray and from not receiving a foundation of unconditional love. When he was a young boy in Tijuana, Carlos had been molested. The American man gave him candy and toys, and the shame Carlos carried in his body had devalued his existence and manhood. I connected his feeling of lack to these experiences of abuse, and that made me believe our relationship could be healed if we could work through the pain.

We tried to protect the children from hearing our arguments and suffering, and we walked gingerly around each other. In therapy together, Carlos talked honestly and began to dig his way out of the underlying drive that allowed him to disconnect from our marriage and that fed his infidelity. I was able to vent my anger and frustration at trying to forgive what I
could not trust. I knew I was holding on too tightly to the ideas and beliefs I had about marriage as partnership. Equality was my goal in marriage as well as life. I cultivated an image of two people sharing every responsibility and buoying each other up in their lifework. We discussed and questioned what we believed about love and our nature as humans on the path of life. Carlos had never received the lessons I had about fidelity and keeping promises. He said, “I love your family and your standards. I want to live up to them.”