When Mark told me in our first appointment that he was co -owner of a mortgage bank with his father, Wes, who had been in a federal prison for fraud, should have fled. After all, I am a career prosecutor. I read rap leaves to dissect a person's past and predict future behavior.
Mark, 30, was eight years younger. He was handsome and educated, with an endearing shine from Oklahoma. But my time to procreate was running out. Sitting in Il Farro on Focaccia, with his vest on a shirt, he looked even more youthful.
Surprisingly, he trusted his father. When the researchers had closed, Wes fled to their yacht in France. After extradition, he wasted his children's trust funds and was convicted. After generalized advertising, Mark's brothers chose to leave his father's last name, but I noticed that Mark kept him.
I admired his loyalty, but after the first date, possibly in an attempt to repel him honestly, I said he needed to have babies soon.
When he called again, I said: “Did you hear me about babies? Anyway, I go to an Ashram to meditate. “That should have turned off! But in my way home after landing at Los Angeles International Airport, I heard the voice mail that I had been asking to see me.
Our differences multiplied. Mark was biblical belt; My parents were survivors of the Holocaust. I dreamed of preparing sea urchins with a boyfriend “sous chef”; He did not cook, and his palate was from the children's menu. I fantasized about the backpack of the world; An excursion to Las Vegas satisfied his passion for travel. I did not read; I wanted to be a writer.
Previously, he had been seduced by a demonstrative courtship, but Mark was not effusive, and when someone made him laugh with “He is hysterical!” In one of my jokes, Mark seemed bewildered.
Finally, I met Wes, a light man with too big glasses from the seventies. I was surprised to find him so naturally charming and gentle. At this point in my legal career, I had seen my part of criminals and I couldn't imagine Wes in an orange monkey. He was also silent as Mark, as in painfully quiet. I filled noise spaces with nervous talk.
When I mentioned Mark, he nodded and said: “My parents took me to a shrink to discover why I didn't talk.” The tranquility was just a feature in his family, I suppose. Unlike most lawyers, Mark did not talk about listening to himself, and his lack of ego intrigued me.
After making love, I noticed how Mark's quiet side also meant that he did not fill space with nervous energy, getting up to shower or check his phone. He was there with me, a parallel presence that had never felt before. While I fell asleep, he said “I love you” so inaudably, maybe I imagined it.
Even so, as we say at work, the jury was out.
On a trip to Hawaii eight months later, I waited for the ring to go out on each Mai Tai at sunset. Didn't I warn him that I didn't have time to lose?
At 11 months, we visited my outdated parents. For them, bringing a man home was serious. At dinner, my dad punctured Mark with his heavy Polish accent. What were Mark's intentions? Mark sat mute. I was furious. I thought about how Mark would not take the name of his stepfather, how no one could make him do something he didn't want: a stubborn mule. I was wasting time.
The following month, in a local osteria, I sat drinking Scarlet Brunello in the light of the candles; Mark looked at his menu, not me.
“Hey,” I said. “I love you, but we are in different pages.”
Mark turned his eyes blank. “Do we have to have this conversation right now?” When I persisted, as a good prosecutor would do, he threw a ring box on the table. Among us, we had ruined their proposal.
There were more warning signs: the week of our wedding, I lost my voice. The day before our wedding, at my parents' house, we had a massive flood. On our wedding day, it was poured, forcing us all inside. After the ceremony, while we led a celebration in the flood, we crashed in the car in front of us.
And on our honeymoon in Italy, we drove through Tuscany and again we had another rear eaves. More portents, I was sure.
But our marriage was not full of disasters, and there were breaks in the clouds that showed Mark's unwavering resistance and depth. Shortly after the wedding, without beats in pregnancy, Mark held me when I cried. With the welcome sound of one beat in another pregnancy, he cried.
When they flattened the postpartum depression and I had a terrible diagnosis of health health, Mark was there with me; His aligned presence was like a pillar that sustained me vertical. Love became more and more about the choice to stay, reinforced by the unwavering resistance and depth of Mark, and less dependent on words.
Mark's father, meanwhile, was in the births of our children. He brought Saltinas and Gatorade when we had stomach flu, and helped us install a washing machine on a weekend. On Sunday dinners, he talked about loyalty, destroying for his devotee son who visited him in prison. I loved Wes.
Thirteen years have passed since my first appointment with Mark, and that was when that initial red flag raised his ugly head. On a verbal disagreement on the investments, Wes hit Mark and Mark left his business, to never talk to his father again. Not long after, Wes took money from an innocent victim.
We are in financial problems unraveling Wes's debts. I had taken 10 years of my work to raise our children, but I went to the district prosecutor's office. When everything is stripped, you see who someone is. I saw how Mark was a survivor. This was an impulse that I knew about my parents.
Mark scratched our savings and bought a new business. In the first weeks in my new position in the County room, I saw the name of Wes in my calendar; He had been arrested. Humiliatingly, I had to tell my new boss that I could not appear in the case.
While looking back in our 25 years of marriage, I see a relationship full of warnings but deeply compensated for Mark's highest value: loyalty. He had seen Mark's fierce devotion to the family, who could make difficult decisions such as maintaining his name and was resistant.
I used to think that you could discover compatibility from distance and anticipate how things would result as if they look at a criminal record to judge if someone would re -cover. But people surprise you. Why a relationship works is a mystery.
And the two car accidents? They turned out to be omens. Mark now has a driving school.
The author wrote a memory, “poorly judged”, about the unlikely friendship he forged with a former gang member who prosecuted that she was sentenced to life imprisonment. She is on Instagram: @karenmckinneywriter
Los Angeles Affairs Chronices The search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the Los Angeles area, and we want to listen to their real history. We pay $ 400 for a published essay. Email [email protected]. You can find presentation guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
