Final Analysis - Catherine Crier [79]
“His decision to leave was based on the restrictions I placed on his truancy and marijuana usage…limiting his access to money: I purchased a safe to keep my wallet in, and refused to provide him with his usual allowance while he was binging on marijuana and until the stolen money was paid back.”
Susan demanded the keys to Eli’s car until he got clean. “Eli decided, against my wishes, to drop out of school and return to California.”
Once home, Eli was continuing with his “out of control drug binging.” Susan noted that her son had a car accident during the Thanksgiving holiday.
“I suggest that his car not be returned to him until he has completed a drug treatment program and either enrolls in school or gets a job,” she advised Felix in the letter. “I also do not believe that he should have access to large sums of cash on weekends for the time being.”
Susan, too, would return to the East Bay by month’s end, and she alerted Felix of her plan. Pointing to their “difficulty agreeing on disciplinary measures” Susan instructed Felix to find a home “elsewhere.” “Eli…is living unsupervised in the cottage in Orinda…which he uses as a ‘party pad’…a gathering place for teenagers to drink and drug,” she wrote. “It seems to me that you attempt to garner sympathy with the children by reversing my decisions. For example, when Adam ran up a $2,000 phone bill in June, and then followed with a $250 phone bill for his cell phone in September, disciplining him was left to me. When he ran up a $540 phone bill for his cell phone for the past month, I finally said enough and confiscated his cell phone OVER YOUR OBJECTIONS.
“You demanded repeatedly that I return it to him. You felt I was being too hard on the boy, which made you very popular with Adam and made me look very bitchy…. When Adam stole $100 out of my wallet…then lied and said Eli or Gabe took it, adding that I was ‘paranoid,’ a term for me he got from you, you supported Adam. You did ask me to tell my side of the story as if I were one of the kids as you have been used to doing….
“You are going to have to set selfish concerns aside and do what is best for the boys.”
On November 27, Gabriel was on a flight for San Francisco and Susan followed by car the next day. Susan was returning to Orinda and to Felix, the man she held responsible for her lifelong misery. Diary entries revealed that the fighting between the couple escalated once she returned to California, and by the end of 2001, Felix had moved out of the house and into a one bedroom apartment.
Nevertheless, the two continued to squabble over money and the payments he owed her. “Meetings with you tend to end badly with threats from you,” she wrote on February 18, 2002. “Your attorney has my phone number. We can communicate through attorneys…. With respect to financial support: your continued support of this family is not contingent upon my persuading the children to see you, my talking to you, or being ‘nice’ to you, or the children’s being ‘nice’ to you.
“You are responsible for supporting the children through college.…I am reducing expenses as much as possible. I have let my cleaning lady go. The boys and I are taking care of the home together. I cannot afford to give Adam an allowance of $100 per week, which I have been doing while he is at college. Adam has gotten a job, as you know. You are legally and ethically responsible for this payment…. Should you continue to shirk your responsibilities, I intend to take legal action against you.”
The scenario was familiar. Felix’s first wife, Sharon Mann, had written similar letters during their divorce, especially in regard to his supposed inability to pay tuition for their son, Andrew, then a freshman at Tufts University. It is interesting that, like his first divorce, Felix’s marriage to Susan was ending after exactly twenty