FOR TWELVE YEARS I loved a man I knew to be somebody’s husband. I didn’t think of him as a husband. I thought of him as my fated one, my true and perfect heart. His name was Mickas my fated one, my true and perfect heart. His name was Mick Crabbe. If you care about college basketball, you’ll already know part of our story. Mick Crabbe was for fifteen years the head men’s basketball coach at Turkman State in West Virginia. Under him, the Warriors went from being a conference and community embarrassment to being a cohesive group that made two credible runs, in Mick’s final years of coaching, at the NCAA title. Roger Fenster, Keevon Simpkins, Eluard Dickens: these are some of Mick’s Turkman State alumni. If you follow pro basketball, you’ll recognize these names.
My name is Genie Toledo. This is a name you won’t recognize. I’m a cardiologist, divorced with one grown daughter, in private practice in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. My two most distinguishing characteristics are that I’m short and that I’m driven. My two younger brothers are each eight inches taller than I am, and they are not tall men. “A pint-sized young lady with a gallon-sized brain,” my principal said before my valedictory speech in high school. I was the first female to make it through the cardiology fellowship at Columbus General. My original partner in Suburban Heart Associates, Jeremy Greathouse (the two of us brought in Howard later on), went through the same fellowship I did, and according to him, when people heard my heels clicking down the hall someone would almost always say, “Holy torpedo, it’s Genie Toledo.”
“And then people would smile,” Jeremy added.
“Was this affection?” I asked, startled, wondering if my shoes were really that noisy. Probably so. From a young age I’ve been aware that serious shoes and clothes are key to gaining respect. A short woman has no fashion leeway.
“I think so,” Jeremy said, tilting his long head. “Yes, definitely. Because you were kind of a figure.” In that moment I could almost see myself as others did: a tiny woman with a big head of dark brown curls, throwing open charts and tossing out questions and barreling through doors.
IT WAS A SATURDAY in early February 2000 when I almost lost a patient in the cardiac angiography suite. No one loses a patient in the cath lab, but I almost did, that day. People may not believe this, but doctors are normal people: they remember their failures and their almost-failures over everything else they do.
“Genie,” Raj the pulmonologist said, waiting for me at the door of the hospital’s doctors’ lounge. “I knew I heard you.” He glanced at my shoes and held open the door.
“Tough cath,” I said, walking into the lounge, my hand hesitating above the platter of doughnuts at the entrance. Doctors’ lounges resemble the lobbies of chain hotels: chairs and sofas in tasteful neutrals, with a burst of color from the TV hanging in the corner. “I wish they’d bring back those pecan rolls,” I said. “I love those pecan rolls. Yeah, my lady coded. V-tach.”
“Get her back?”
I nodded, and bit down on a frosted doughnut with a creamy filling. “Seven years younger than me too. Forty. It worked out. I got the stent in. It wasn’t even a major vessel. The spooky thing was when I was putting in the wire I said, Maybe we could treat this with pills, but as long as I’m in here I’m going to open it, and she said, Good, you get me cured, and then, kaboom, I inflate the balloon and she’s out.”
“That’s the great thing about bronchoscopies, my patients can’t talk.” Raj sat down and turned up the volume on the TV, used the remote to run through the channels.
“Her name’s Nola. Pretty name, isn’t it? She said it means ‘little bell.’ ” I was talking too much, but I did that after a scare. Raj stopped the channel-changing at basketball, and a familiar announcer’s voice broke in: “. . . and once again you’ve got to credit Mick Crabbe for the amazing things he’s done and just keeps doing with this . . .”
Mickey? That late already? I checked my watch. 2:05 P.M. That late. “You watching much college basketball this year, Raj?”
“Of course.” Raj laughed apologetically. He was even younger than my patient Nola, and had done his fellowship at Duke. “This is a good game here.” He nodded at the screen. “Walthrop U is always good, and Turkman went to the Sweet Sixteen last year, and the question is whether they can do it again. Good coach.”
“I think I recognize him,” I said. Mick looked ordinary, in a boyish (although he was fifty-one), old jock sort of way. When I first described him to my friend Tessa I was reluctant to use the word “handsome,” in case she, seeing him later, would smile at my description. Instead I told her about Mick’s ruffled light brown hair (not a hint of baldness, he was vain about this), his pink, almost shapely lips and Paul Newman eyes. He was big next to me—six foot one—but short compared with his players. In the eleven years I’d known him, he was constantly fighting a paunch. “Look at this,” he’d say one week, squeezing the fleshy part of his belly between his two hands, “I can do the jiggle dance!”—and a few weeks later he’d be turning himself sideways for me to ooh and ahh over his silhouette.
“His name’s Mick Crabbe,” Raj told me. “Very smart. He recruits these kids nobody thinks are very good, and then he motivates them somehow, and they get great. No one knows how he does it.”
I knew how he did it, sort of. He found kids who didn’t think anyone would be looking, who didn’t expect to be found, and through discipline and cajoling and belief shaped them into people who felt useful. There were certain kids he simply recognized, understood, after a few moments of watching them, what they yearned for, what they feared. The spark and the dark, Mick called it.
“Oh!” Raj said. “Damn, damn, damn.” He turned to me. “Did you see that? Turkman just got the ball to their forward, he was totally open, but he missed the shot and Walthrop got the rebound.” Raj had come to the United States when he was in his twenties. I wondered if he’d followed basketball in India.
The forward’s name was Tom Kennilworth. He was a married sophomore with a child, and a week ago he’d told Mick he was thinking of leaving his wife for his English tutor. Since then, Mick had been trying to get the tutor changed. Kennilworth was Turkman’s only white starter and his tutor was black: a twist in the story, I thought. I would have liked to tell Raj.
Someone on the Walthrop team made a three-pointer, and Raj hit his forehead with his palm. Frederick Flitt, the Turkman point guard, took the ball to Turkman’s end of the court and passed it around, finally getting it to their center, Eluard Dickens, just under the basket, but instead of taking a shot Dickens passed it out to Kennilworth, the forward who’d just missed. Kennilworth arced this one through the basket: three points.
“Oh!” Raj said, throwing his arms up and closing his eyes and paddling his feet on the floor. “The unselfishness of that guy!”
“You mean Dickens?” I said. Raj nodded emphatically, and I wished that I could tell him why Eluard Dickens was not a player to be admired. At the same time I felt a pang that was close to jealousy, because if there was one thing that scared me, it wasn’t Mick’s wife or children or team or even the sport of basketball, it was Mick’s affection—his devotion—to a certain type of player, a player whose focus was not personal glory or statistics but the success of the team itself. Mick would not use the word “unselfish” for Eluard Dickens—Eluard was a disappointment—but he used it all the time in that sense for his point guard, Frederick Flitt. I often felt uncomfortable when Mick talked about Frederick. He might have been going on and on about some woman, making it clearer with each compliment that I, while a good person, was not in the same league.
The game went on. “I should go home,” Raj said, not moving.
“I should too,” I said, although there was no one for me to go home to. Unselfish—I wondered if anyone ever used that word for me. Maybe. Probably. Locally, I was a respected cardiologist. Most nights my heels clicked through the hospital halls until sometime after eight. Some nights I barely slept. I often told my elderly patients, who worried most about my being alone, that any man not married to me was lucky.
At halftime the Turkman State Warriors were leading by two points, and I left Raj to watch the rest of the game by himself. Another one of Raj’s new cars—a red Corvette with PULMODOC, for “pulmonary doctor,” plates—was parked in the doctors’ lot next to my Honda, and I walked sideways to my door so I wouldn’t touch it.
At home, I switched on the TV. Claudia had finally moved out, gotten an apartment for her final year of college, although her collection of ceramic frogs still sat on the mantel. Claudia had declared a major in marketing recently, which was a shame, I thought, for a pretty girl with a kind heart. But everything these days was a business. I knew Claudia, who would always prefer hanging out with her friends to studying, would never be a candidate for medical school, but what about nursing or physical therapy? “Why should I do anything in health care?” Claudia had said, her face flushing as it always did when she disagreed with me. “Health care eats you up.”
Eluard Dickens had been fouled and was standing at the free-throw line. I wished for the umpteenth time that I understood fouls better. I would get a lot more enjoyment from a game, I thought, if I understood fouling on a deep level. A few times Mick had agreed to watch a game with me in our hotel room so he could explain the arcana, but that had never lasted long.
Eluard missed the first shot. The camera flashed to Mick and I sat up straighter. Mick’s mouth was a line and he was looking straight ahead. He’d said on the phone the night before that he might be getting a cold, but why was he just sitting there? The camera peered up at Eluard as he made his second shot. He was a handsome guy, with dark skin, a broad flat face, and eyes that always looked like they were searching for something. This time his shot went through the basket. A Walthrop player took the ball out-of-bounds, and the game was back on.
I stood up until the game ended, there in the family room of my enormous house that backed onto a golf course, trying to catch another glimpse of Mick, as if by standing I could look into the TV and see things outside a sitting viewer’s range. Mick’s cellphone number was programmed into my phone, and the instant this game and the postgame interviews and Mick’s obligatory fifteen minutes with his team were finished I’d dial his number. Turkman State won, 74-69, and Mick should look happy, he should have that relaxed face, that thrown-back-shoulders walk, he should hug his players, shake the opposing coach’s hand with firm graciousness. He was doing these things, but something was wrong: his step was slower than usual, and his face was caved in on itself like a partially deflated balloon.
It was rare to see Mick unhappy. Once he told me that before he went to sleep each night he ran through a mental list of his players— not in prayer, exactly, but as a way of wishing them well. My name was on that list too. He believed in positive thinking. Missed buses, delayed flights, canceled games—when something unfortunate happened, Mick always said it wasn’t the end of the world. “We had extra time to go over the tapes,” he’d say, or “The guys played poker in the airport, had a really good time,” or “I finally got some sleep”—and then the closing, his mantra: “It all worked out.” Always, things worked out for Mick. What other people might take as a setback or failure, Mick took as a step toward working out. “A loss can be your best friend,” he often said. I read somewhere that the Chinese think of luck as a character trait, like stubbornness or generosity. It seemed to me that Mick believed so fervently in luck that he brought it on himself. At some point during our years together, I started thinking I was lucky too.
My beeper went off. I always kept my beeper close—clipped to my pocket or waistband, or attached to the strap of my handbag—and set to the vibrate mode, because I hated calling attention to myself with beeping. I looked at the message tickertaping through the window followed by the patient’s phone number.
JEFFERSON CAROTHERS: NEEDS REFILL
I hated med refill requests. A weekend refill meant two phone calls—one to the patient and one to the pharmacy—and listening to a lot of explaining. I reached for the phone on the coffee table, but before I could pick it up it started ringing. “Hello?” I said, muting the TV, and the abruptness in my voice startled me, made me tell myself to calm down. “Mickey?”
But it wasn’t Mickey. Mickey was on TV talking to Elaine Johnson of ESPN, who always, I thought, looked at him a little too intently. “She stares at you like a dog,” I complained to him once. “She’s not a dog at all,” he answered, grinning.
The person on the phone was my manicurist, telling me she was pulling into my driveway for her weekly housecall (four P.M. Saturday). “Just walk in,” I said. My beeper buzzed again:
Mr. Carothers’s sister was visiting from Illinois, and first he didn’t think about his pills, then he . . . On the screen in front of me Mick’s forehead gave a twitch.
My God, Mick, I thought,
are you feeling okay? Every cardiac disease scenario I knew ran through my head. A thought almost made me gasp:
Mick, how could I live without you? “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Mr. Carothers said. “I’ve got to find the pharmacy number here. . . .” My beeper went off again.
MAURINE SCOTT: STRANGE THROBBING
I scribbled on my palm the number Mr. Carothers gave me. The beeper buzzed again
GLENDA ZAHLLER: BLOOD PRESSURE LOW
and I could hear Angela shut the front door behind her, and Elaine Johnson was addressing the camera. Mick was gone and I’d missed what he said and I was swearing at myself for not taping it, and then somehow I had called in Mr. Carothers’s prescription and ordered a blood thinner for a patient on 4-North, and I was on the phone again, listening to Mrs. Scott describe her throbbing—which was less in her chest than in her abdomen, and maybe was worse after eating—as Angela unfolded her little table and set out her implements. “On call this weekend, hunh?” Angela whispered, making a sympathetic pout. I gave her my free hand.
THOMAS DINGLE: QUESTION RE MEDS
ANNA WAKOSKI: BP 220/180 AND DIZZY
NICKI LEWIS: NEEDS REFILL
MEGAN WECKSTEIN: POSSIBLE STROKE
3-WEST: PT ALLERGY
“Busy day, hunh?” Angela said, pointing at the number on my palm. She went to my kitchen and came back with a slip of blank paper.
I ended up sending Strange Throbbing to the ER, and also Glenda Zahller, because both of them were my partner Howard’s patients and I didn’t feel safe making diagnoses on the phone. Howard was a mediocre cardiologist: who knew what pathology he’d missed or discounted? I privately referred to Howard as my unfortunate partner. Calls from his patients were like grenades I had to step elaborately around. The other calls were from my own or Jeremy’s patients (I trusted Jeremy, my other partner: we’d known each other since we were med students) and easier to take care of. I made each person promise to call again if what I’d suggested didn’t work.
“It wasn’t bad until half an hour ago,” I told Angela, who had finished her massaging and soaking and cuticle clipping and was now painting my nails their usual In the Pink. Could I call Mick yet? I wondered, glancing at the time on my beeper. “I’m supposed to meet my daughter for dinner at six.”
Another buzz as I was talking to Mr. Lewis’s pharmacist, and a message from a patient I didn’t know:
PHILIP MERCER: SEVERE CHEST PAINS
“Shit,” I said to Angela, removing my right hand from under her drying light and carefully reaching for the phone. “I may not get to dinner at all.”
BUT AN HOUR LATER I was at dinner, surprisingly, because Philip Mercer, who was Jeremy’s patient, actually had inactive heart disease but active lung cancer eroding his ribs, and he was only calling for a cardiologist because his oncologist wasn’t answering his page. Mr. Mercer wanted to know if he could up his dose of morphine. I told him yes. “Thanks, doc,” he said. “You saved my life.”
“At least you haven’t had to go back to the hospital,” Claudia said at the door of the restaurant. Her round face was rosy from the cold and she was wearing a knit striped hat that made her look like a child, although she was twenty-one years old. She had my curly hair and her father’s fairer coloring. When she walked her toes pointed slightly inward, which gave her a wiggly bounce. “Adorable,” people always said about her.
“Not yet.” I followed Claudia inside, to a dark room where the tables were topped with checkerboard linoleum, and all manner of battered road signs and farm implements hung on the walls. Claudia and I liked the hamburgers at this restaurant. “Shoot,” I said, reaching for my beeper, seeing another name I didn’t know:
WILMA EDWARDS: CAN’T BREATHE
“It may be nothing,” I said. “I just called a severe chest pain and it was nothing.” God, I was thinking, I hope it’s someone of Jeremy’s. I reached into my handbag for my cellphone, careful of my new nails, and pushed my menu to the center of the table. “You order for me.”
Wilma Edwards was sick. Wilma Edwards was eighty-four and a diabetic and Howard’s (damn it, damn it) patient, and the shortness of breath had hit her while she was watching the home and garden channel. It took a while to get this out of her, because every few words she interrupted herself with a wheeze. She hadn’t had chest pain, but a diabetic can have a heart attack without chest pain. I told Wilma Edwards to call 911.
“I may have to leave,” I told the waitress. “Can you put a rush on this?”
MATTHEW MONEY: PALPITATIONS
“Here,” Claudia said, handing me a bookstore plastic bag. “Before it’s too late.”
“Oh God,” I said. “It’s not a Tessa book, is it?” For years my friend Tessa Fletcher Swensen, in an attempt to improve my life, had given me books whose authors she had seen on TV talk shows. Claudia was used to my wisecracks about those books, which had started feminist but lately veered from the psychological to the spiritual—on the shelf where I kept them you could trace the evolution from essay collections blurbed by Gloria Steinem, to how to be an optimist, to the Dalai Lama.
“I hope not,” Claudia said as I opened the bag. “It’s a relaxation tape. Detra recommended it.” Detra was Claudia’s oldest friend, the indulged child of two doctors, a girl with a barbed-wire tattoo around her upper arm and what she called a jones for yoga.
Soothing Sounds for Seasons of Serenity was the tape’s title. “Great,” I said, nodding. “Serenity.” As if I’d ever have the time to play it.
CHRISTINE ROUDEBUSH: EAR PAIN, PACEMAKER
“I better catch up on these calls.”
Claudia said, “I bought it for you to play in the car. Maybe, you know, Thursdays.”
Thursdays were the evenings I drove the interstates to and from Mick. “Claudia,” I said, pleased and startled, “that’s very, very sweet. Thank you. I will play it.”
SIMON JACOBS: OUT OF POTASSIUM
Money, the patient with the palpitations, I took care of with an extra dose of his med. For Jacobs, I called in a refill.
“How’s school going?” I asked Claudia.
She shrugged. “Okay.”
“How’s your apartment?”
“My garbage disposal backed up and I had this disgusting water in the sink. I called the landlord but he . . .”
“Hello, this is Dr. Toledo.” Christine Roudebush had answered. I held a finger up to Claudia. She nodded and started in on her hamburger.
“Well, Mrs. Roudebush, I understand you’re my partner’s patient, but ears really aren’t his area,” I said. “You need to call your primary care doctor. I wouldn’t even know what to give you for an earache. I’d probably prescribe you nose drops or something.”
“I don’t know how you stand it,” Claudia muttered.
“No,” I said, “definitely not. An ear infection will not affect your pacemaker.”
WILMA EDWARDS: STILL CAN’T BREATHE
“I saw part of Turkman’s game today,” Claudia said when I hung up.
“You did?” Claudia hardly ever watched Mick’s games. This was a new leaf for her, all this attention to me and Mick. “Did you think he looked all right at the end? I was worried about him. I wanted to call him earlier but . . .” I realized that between my manicure and the commotion of my pages I’d forgotten about calling Mick at all. What was wrong with me? I’d been so worried about him! Now it was too late to call him, because he might be home. Of course Mick was all right. He was always all right. He was a man blissfully free—other than some urinary hesitancy, which between us had become a joke—of symptoms and neuroses. I rechecked Wilma Edwards’s number on the pager. “I’m sorry, but I’d better call this one right back. It’s the same lady I told to call 911.”
“Could it be asthma?” Wilma Edwards wheezed. “My grand-daughter has asthma, and I thought . . .”
I told her again, more firmly, through bites of my hamburger, to call 911.
“You’ll meet Mick someday,” I told Claudia. “You’ll like him.”
She shifted slightly in her seat, looked toward a rusty license plate hammered to the wall. “I hope so,” she said.
I picked at my french fries, cutting each one in three bites so I’d feel satisfied with six. “So did you get your disposal fixed?”
“My neighbor did it.”
“A male neighbor?” I asked, as Claudia blushed. “A nice neighbor?”
“I was embarrassed for him to see what was in my sink.”
WILMA EDWARDS: REALLY CAN’T BREATHE, 3RD CALL
“Oh, for crying out loud.” I reached again for the phone. “Mrs. Edwards,” I said, “call 911. Have you heard the expression ‘God helps those who help themselves’? You need to help yourself.”
She didn’t have the air to pronounce a full sentence. “I don’t want to . . . wake up . . . husband.”
“When 911 comes, let them wake up your husband. Listen to me, you’ve called three times and the next time you’ll be dying and I can’t come flying through the phone to resuscitate you. I’m not a magician, okay? I can’t come flying through the phone.”
Claudia dropped her hamburger and pushed her plate away.
“I’m hanging up right now so you can call,” I told Wilma Edwards.
“She’ll be okay,” I assured Claudia in a milder voice. “She’s old and she’s scared, and I’ll call her back in a minute to be sure she’s called for help.”
“You were almost yelling at her.”
“Patients can be like children. Sometimes you have to shout for their attention.”
Claudia scratched an eyelid with her thumbnail, gave a short laugh. “I’m glad you never shouted at me like that!”
“Oh, Claudia,” I said, and my voice broke with affection. “Remember how Tessa used to lift up the back of your hair?” Is she a cyborg? Is that why she’s a perfect child? Tessa would ask, checking Claudia’s head for a hidden switch. I wish Giles and Mandy were even half as good.
That Giles really was bad, I thought bitterly, wishing again I’d stepped in between him and Claudia. Had that brief and unfortunate relationship really ended just over a year before? In a way it felt like something from another life. But maybe not to Claudia.
“I always hated it when Tessa pulled up my hair like that,” Claudia said, and maybe I should have pursued her comment, should have said, You really hated it? Why? But I had crazy, stubborn Mrs. Edwards to think of, and I already had picked up the phone to call her back. The life squad was coming, she told me, and her husband was awake. “I hope . . . right thing,” she fretted on the phone.
DEBBIE FISHER: PAIN DOWN LEFT ARM
“Of course you did the right thing, Mrs. Edwards,” I said.
Claudia looked relieved.
AN HOUR LATER I was at the hospital, helping the on-call nurse, Helen, push Mrs. Edwards on her cot down the hall from the emergency room to the angiography suite. Mrs. Edwards was having a massive heart attack, and it was my job to slip a catheter in her groin and up through the aorta and out into the heart’s major blood vessels, where I hoped to locate the blockage and open it. “With a little luck, we can reverse this heart attack,” I told Mrs. Edwards. “Your heart will be like nothing ever happened.”
Helen looked tired. She was in her mid-fifties and had been working in the cath lab for almost twenty years. Jeremy called her Lady Madonna for her calm. Her children were grown, and her husband was ill with chronic hepatitis. When she was on call for the cath lab she wore two pagers, one for hospital calls and one for calls from him. “You’ll be fine,” she said to Mrs. Edwards, who looked frail enough to be smothered by the weight of a blanket. “Dr. Toledo is our best doctor.”
“Thank you, Helen,” I said. I used to tell patients I pay her to say that, but then I realized that response was not quite kind.
When I opened Mrs. Edwards’s blocked vessel her breathing went from labored to normal within minutes. “Oh,” she said in surprise, opening her eyes, “I feel better.” Modern technology had indeed made possible tiny miracles, and for a moment, as my eyes met Helen’s above her surgical mask, I appreciated that again. I wished Helen’s husband’s hepatitis could be wiped out with such a miracle, but the medicine they’d tried hadn’t worked, and he was too old for a transplant.
Soon I was standing in the hallway next to Mrs. Edwards’s cot, holding down the wad of bandages to keep pressure on the punctured groin artery for the obligatory twenty minutes, using my left hand to click through the messages that had accumulated on my pager during the cath.
JACK CRAIG: DEFIBRILLATOR WENT OFF
LUCY ZHOU: TOOK 2 PILLS BY ACCIDENT
MARJORIE RHODES: ANGINA AGAIN AND AGAIN
My cellphone didn’t work this deep in the building, and as I waited for Helen to bring me a portable phone I looked down the white corridor and thought how this scene was the essence of hospital: an empty corridor that looked like daylight in the night. Where’s Mickey now? I thought, imagining him with his feet up on an ottoman, a remote control in his hand, and I saw something like a scare-crow approaching, arms held out from its body and long stiff legs and a bobbing head. I wondered for a second if I was hallucinating.
“Is that your husband?” Helen said, emerging from a side room with my phone, and as Mrs. Edwards turned to look down the hall her face lit up. “Harry!” she called. “Here I am!”
He asked, once he finally reached us, if his wife could have some water.
“Ice chips would be fine,” I said, and Helen went away and came back with a plastic cup, from which Mr. Edwards, his quivering hand made still with purpose, spooned pieces of ice into his wife’s waiting mouth.
“The ER just called to say Mrs. Fisher’s here,” Helen whispered. “Her EKG and her enzymes are okay, but she refuses to go home until she talks to you.”
I nodded, thinking how Mrs. Fisher was a worrier, but not without reason, and it would be easier for both of us to admit her overnight. “Tell them I’ll be down there in ten minutes.”
“Umm,” Mrs. Edwards said in her wispy voice, “tastes delicious.”
“I’m glad you woke me up,” her husband told her. My hand was on Mrs. Edwards’s thigh and I was making my phone calls maybe eight inches from Mr. Edwards’s shoulder, but as far as they were concerned, I could be a thousand miles away.
I wonder if we’ll get there, I thought, thinking of Mick and me together in our old age. Not married—I would never marry again—but together every day, in our own place, with our own big bed and kitchen table. We could go out to eat then without fear of being seen. We could see a movie.
“You’d better get to the hospital,” I told Marjorie Rhodes over the phone. “I’m here. As soon as you hang up, call 911.”
I know not everyone can understand the person I was then. On Thursdays I left my office at the early-for-me time of seven and drove eighty-four miles by interstate to a Marriott hotel in Marietta, Ohio, a mile from the northern bank of the Ohio River. I was eleven years into an affair with a married man I saw for two hours once a week, and I was delighted with those hours. They were enough for me. I wasn’t suffering with doubt or angst or anger, although if I read the books Tessa gave me, I suspect that they would tell me that I was. They weren’t judgmental books. They wouldn’t call what Mick and I were doing immoral. Their concern would be my happiness and fulfillment. They’d tell me that I was being used, that I shouldn’t settle, that I was a deserving person in the process of becoming so much more.
I was more. In Mick’s and my hotel room, my serious clothes and shoes were off, my beeper was in my car, and no one but the man I loved knew exactly where I was. How could I taint such peace with pleadings for divorce or separation, or practical plans for the future? I read somewhere that astronauts, freed from gravity, find that a small space becomes enormous. In Mick’s and my hotel room, we lost gravity. Not every meeting was perfect, but most weeks, for at least some minutes, Mick and I were tumbling through the air.
