She looked at me for a long moment, her eyes soft and maybe showing a touch of shame. Finally she nodded. "I understand Bill. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have brought that up."
But I wondered if she really understood. Somehow I didn't think she did.
Argument with Tracy aside, the Christmas break of 1983 ranks up there as one of the most enjoyable two weeks of either of my lives. I was in love and my love was being returned. It was the initial, realization stage of love, the time of discovery, a time that comes very rarely in a person's lifetime, never for some. It was a time that had never occurred in my previous life.
Nina and I saw each other whenever we could, doing whatever struck our fancy. We went Christmas shopping together, holding hands as we walked through the crowded mall. We went to movies together, cuddling against each other and occasionally sharing a kiss. We sat for hours sometimes just talking, reveling in the friendship that we shared and that we'd almost lost, just enjoying being together.
More than ever I looked forward to seeing her. More than ever I felt the pang of withdrawal when she could not make it over during the day or if she could not arrange to talk to me on the phone. These feelings were almost foreign to me, surprising in their power and depth. Nina made me realize how foolish I'd been in my previous life to ever think that I'd really been in love.
Even the feelings I once had for Lisa, my ex-wife, paled in comparison. Nina made me realize what a farce our relationship had been, how it had been a drastic mistake from the very beginning. Had I really ever thought I'd loved her?
Lisa and I had met when I'd responded to a call for a fall in a grocery store in South Spokane. Paramedics are automatically cynical of fall calls in grocery stores or other places of business. Usually what you find when you get there is someone who has accidentally or even deliberately come crashing to the ground and is seeing dollar signs in their eyes from a future law suit against the business.
Such was my attitude upon entering the Raley's store that afternoon. What I'd found however was not a fat welfare recipient with visions of a six figure settlement, but an attractive stocker who had gotten her ankle caught in a ladder while putting fresh merchandise on the shelf. She had fallen, twisting the ankle into an unnatural position. She was dark haired, dark eyed, and beautiful. Being the visually stimulated person I was back then, I was immediately intrigued by her, imagining what that body looked like under her uniform. I began my exam of her, coming to a medical conclusion in less than a second. Her ankle was swollen and angulated to the left. She was obviously in pain. Her face was scrunched up and beads of sweat were standing out on her forehead. Broken tibia and fibula. Nasty and painful but not lethal or crippling.
Paramedics often measure a person's personality traits by their pain tolerance. When a person whines and moans about a simple little cut on the finger, behaving as if someone had rammed a hot poker up his or her ass, that person is judged to be of poor character. But when a person has an obviously fractured bone and declines an offer of morphine to help ease it and even offers to drive themselves to the hospital as Lisa did that day, that person is judged to be someone to reckon with. I sat in the back of the ambulance with her that day admiring her character, and her looks. This was my first mistake, rating my future wife by the black and white standards of my cynical profession.
There are of course ethical rules against asking patients out on dates. That extends to taking phone numbers, names, or any other personal information from the paperwork for later use. However if a paramedic on lunch break should happen to choose a certain grocery store to buy his deli sandwiches, a certain grocery store where a certain stocker was now working as a checker in order to keep off her broken ankle, there are no ethical concerns in that situation. Over the next month I bought deli sandwiches for lunch every day. I bought them until I was so sick of them that I would drop them in the garbage can on the way out of the store and then head for Taco Bell or McDonalds. I always chose the line that Lisa was checking, no matter how many people were in it, no matter how empty the other lines were.
I don't want to sound like I was a stalker or anything. If Lisa had given me some indication that she didn't like my flirtations I would have ceased immediately. But she didn't. She obviously enjoyed the attention she was getting from me and she shamelessly flirted back. Finally I asked her out and she accepted.
We began dating regularly, crossing over the line into the land of boyfriend and girlfriend. I took her home to meet my parents and she took me home to meet hers. Both of us at the time were living with roommates in small apartments and both of us were sick of it. It wasn't long before we decided to move in together.
It was about then that we began telling each other that we loved one another. Was it true? I thought it was then. I really did. After all, you didn't move into an apartment with a girl, you didn't share a bed with her if you didn't love her, did you? It seemed to make perfect sense. We were in love. After all, she could take broken ankle pain. What was not to love about her?
Only after spending that first night with Nina, only after I felt what true love was really like, did I realize how idiotic this supposition really was.
Lisa and I didn't love each other, we were roommates. We'd enjoyed each other's bodies a few times on a purely physical level and then, to get away from unpleasant living arrangements, we moved in together and called it love. We called it love so often that we started to believe that it WAS love.
Before long we decided to get married. I didn't fall down on my knee and propose to her. I didn't hire a pilot to write 'marry me Lisa' in the sky. Our decision to marry came about after a long discussion on how much we would save on taxes and car insurance and about how her parents would stop making snide remarks about us living in sin. We didn't even call it marriage when we discussed it. We talked of 'legitimizing our relationship'.
Even then there were strong indicators that it wouldn't work. We had different views on many things; different views that often led to arguments.
We had trouble talking together at times. She had no understanding for the bizarre hours that I had to work and for the frequent late calls that brought me home as much as two hours late at times. When I tried to explain some of the frustrations of my job to her she would only look at me with a blank expression and then ask what was on TV. When she tried to talk to me about her job frustrations I would do the same. We were not really living on the same planet with each other, but we were in love, weren't we? That was all that mattered, wasn't it? If I thought about these problems at all during this time it was only to tell myself that marriage would change all that. When you got married you REALLY loved each other. That was the rules, wasn't it?
So we did it. We sent out invitations and had a large wedding at a local park in the springtime. Lisa looked ravishing in her wedding dress. I looked handsome in my tux. Some great pictures and some great video were produced from the affair. We flew off to Hawaii for our honeymoon and had some great sex. We lounged on the beach and I felt pride at the throngs of males that were admiring the view of my new wife in her bikini. I'd surely bagged a hot one, hadn't I? And we loved each other deeply of course. We said it every day.
We settled into an unpleasant routine much faster than we should have. Before three months went by I was calling her 'the old lady' to my friends and grumbling about balls and chains. Our arguments grew more frequent and more intense. We realized that we could not stand even being around each other except when we were having sex, the only aspect of our relationship where no problems existed. I was eventually forced to admit to myself that I was not happy, that I was no longer 'in love' with my wife. I began to toss around the idea of divorce in my head.