Heck Of A Guy

While Julie¹ was emotionally and geographically ricocheting through the first half of the 70’s, my life during that same time was, by comparison, staid and straight-forwardly conventional, yet richly morose and perfused by free-floating anxiety.

[Note: Readers who may be put off by the notion of reading about six years of "staid and straight-forwardly conventional" life events should be reassured that, handled skillfully, such content can result in a sophisticated and intriguing narrative of psychological exploration. The following, unfortunately, is not one of those narratives; it may be helpful to consider it a warped set-up for the punch line coming in the next episode of this saga.]

While I was undeniably disappointed that I had lost Julie and ashamed that I had failed to even imagine the possibility that we might have been together until the moment such a fantasy was precluded by her elopement with Philip, I was not devastated, afflicted with an aching longing for her, or enraged at either Julie or Philip.

That she moved in with Philip did not alter my feelings toward Julie. I acclimated to the new circumstances rapidly enough, even helping move Julie’s belongings to her new home, an act which prompted Philip and my friends to label me, variously, a good sport, a gentleman, or a sap. It was simpler than that – Julie asked me to help and, as we would later joke, I never told her “No.” Of course, another, equally valid perspective is that Julie never asked anything of me to which I had to say “No.”

And, that dynamic was, I realized later, the primary explanation for my behavior at this point, i.e., Julie wanted to be with Philip, and I never denied Julie her wishes.

Julie and I corresponded on an erratic schedule, and I visited her and Philip once after they moved to another city, but gradually our communication lessened and after two or three years, ceased altogether.

Life, as it is wont to do, goes on. I graduated with a BA in English and an acceptance letter to medical school. A reasonable sense of my experience during those years of medical school can be garnered from these condensed characterizations:

• The coursework and clinical requirements were academically challenging but certainly not overwhelming.
• I formed a number of friendships, some quite deep and enduring (hardly a surprise given that most of us in our class of 100 spent the majority of time during that four years in each others company).
• I probably fell in the 80th percentile of our class’s despondency rankings, which were anchored by the one suicide that is apparently obligatory for a medical school class and the one likely but unproven suicide (the guy who drove his motorcycle into the space between the headlights of a truck). My sub-clinical depression, however, correlated only modestly with medical school, and had been present since my adolescence.
• I didn’t drink before I went to medical school; I did drink by the end of medical school.
• I was a virgin before I went to medical school; I was not a virgin by the end of medical school
• Oddly, the preceding two changes were not related

Oh, and I got married.

I had dated only occasionally in college and medical school, and the only woman I had seen over a long period of time was Martha, whom I had dated intermittently since high school. Three decades later, I’m still unsure why either of us committed this marriage other than it seemed like the thing to do after seven years of steamy weekends.

To be fair, Martha was bright enough, attractive enough, and amorous enough at our mutual deflowering and on subsequent occasions when opportunity presented itself. She lacked any scary traits: she wasn’t an alcoholic, didn’t abuse drugs, hadn’t been diagnosed bipolar, and had no felony convictions. And, … well, that’s about it.

I have no idea why she wanted to marry me. My guess is that if she were asked that today, she would be similarly clueless.

But, wed we were, near the end of my third year of medical school. Martha moved into the house trailer where I had lived three years, found a job teaching elementary school, and soon became increasingly unhappy.

In retrospect, the problem, from my admittedly biased point of view, was that Martha’s parents were too damn happy. She, understandably enough, saw them as the only possible model for happiness and the more we strayed from their patterns and beliefs, the more discontented Martha became. For one thing, her parents didn’t live in a 10′-wide trailer. They also had children (we had agreed we didn’t want kids until I was in private practice), a paycheck earned by her father and handed over to her mother (Martha was our primary bread-winner that first year), and spent time together gardening, eating out, and visiting with friends (our evenings and weekends that weren’t given over to reading medical journals, being on-call, or preparing for rounds were spent with my classmates obsessing about medical school gossip and politics).

Matters reached the point that, prior to our first anniversary, Martha and I were talking about divorce. Instead, we both held out the hope that moving to Chicago, where I would serve my residency, might ameliorate matters.

It didn’t.

We packed up our troubles in a U-Haul and moved into an apartment in a Chicago suburb. Although my psychiatric residency didn’t begin until September, I had arranged to work in the hospital’s medical units that summer to earn rent money. I have a vivid memory of driving on Lake Shore Drive on a sunshine suffused Sunday with hundreds of sailboats on the Lake, folks picnicking in the parks, and others playing on the beach. I was on my way to my twelve hour Emergency Room shift, which that day began with a case of an elderly, sickly man with a massive impaction.

Still, spending my days and nights rotating through the ER, an internal medicine floor, and the peritoneal dialysis unit was preferable to being home, where our mutual unhappiness had accelerated to the point that I requested and received administrative permission to take a week off before my residency officially started to deal with our marital problems.

Once the residency began, I was, like every other resident, too busy. There was always something I needed to do for a patient, to prepare for a case presentation, or just keep up with the work. Martha and I again wavered on the edge of divorce and actually filed once but withdrew the papers. We did have times we enjoyed together – they just weren’t frequent or enjoyable enough.

So, there you have it. Just as I warned, my life during these years was a prolonged trudge into unhappiness, punctuated with few catastrophes or exhalations. The high intensity catastrophe-exaltation phase of my life wasn’t to begin until I heard from Julie.

And that was when I got the letter.

____________________________________

[Previous Installment Of Julie's Story: Julie’s Sojourn In The Wilderness, Part III]
[Next Installment Of Julie's Story: The Letter]
[First Installment Of Julie's Story: This Is How A Love Story Began]

Footnotes

1. Julie Showalter was the fiercely intelligent, sexy, and loving woman and prize-winning author, with whom I had a outrageously wonderful 20 year marriage that ended with her death in late 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding nearly 20 years earlier. Many posts on this blog are about her, our unlikely romance, and our life together, and still others consist of her writings. Information can be found at Julie Showalter FAQ.↩

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