The White – Or At Least Very Pale – Chapter
Happiness writes white
Henri de Montherlant
I did not recognize the Caribbean Ocean the first time I saw it. Compared to Lake Michigan as seen from Lake Shore Drive or the Gulf of Mexico viewed from the less than pristine beaches of Port Arthur, Texas, the waters surrounding the coast of Jamaica seemed too vivid, too bright, too gorgeous to be real. It is my great good fortune that I can call up, on demand, certain scenes with Julie1 in colors that brilliant and details that acuate. In my mind, I can see specific phrases she spoke etched in deep-grooved letters chiseled in gleaming metal. I can even picture the typeface – these words are not written in Arial or any such fonts with gentle curves; no, these are set out in a typeface that is all acute and right angles, Engravers or perhaps Felix Titling.
I’m not suggesting that this is an ability unique to me or that it is even unusual. I am, however, fascinated with the contrast between my capacity to quote, for example, the exact phrases Julie spoke to me when we first met or to place events of my life and Julie’s sojourns to Puerto Rico and Wichita Falls on a timeline and the fuzzy static that constitutes my recall of the two years following Julie’s move to Chicago. I am certain that this period was hectic, harried, and happy, but beyond that – fuzz.
Consequently, I’m reduced to baldly listing, in random, non-chronological order, the bits and pieces of information that may be important as context for later events. Think of it as the Cliff Notes chapter.
My Divorce
My divorce was completed with few surprises. I could have put up more of a legal fight and ended up with more of our possessions, but I was willing to surrender merchandise and even pay alimony to hasten the process. After the divorce, my ex-wife and I never spoke to each other again. A couple of years later, I did, however, see a photo of her and her baby – tacked on my mother’s bulletin board.
Julie & Sears
Within two or three weeks, Julie had landed a job at in marketing research at Sears, the obvious next step in Julie’s vocational sequence: from English Department Faculty member at universities in Puerto Rico and Wichita Falls, Texas to Assistant To The Head Of Marketing at a Wichita Falls bank to a member of the professional staff of a statistically based marketing research department. And, yes, she was terrific. Fastest promotions, unprecedented raises, yeah, yeah, yeah, … . To properly evaluate this accomplishment, one must keep in mind that in those days, Sears headquarters at the Sears Tower was officially designated within the company as “Parent” and operated in such a fashion that one of Julie’s colleagues could comment, without irony or evoking incredulity from others, that “If I had known that working hard and doing a good job would get you promoted faster, I would have done that too.”
Psychiatry Has Been Very, Very Good To Me
I finished my residency and began living the cliché that was the Michael Reese career path: I opened an office at 180 N. Michigan Avenue, which was also the address of the Chicago Institute Of Psychoanalysis, and saw inpatients at Reese and a private hospital to sustain my practice until I had enough outpatients to drop the hospital visits and spend my professional time exclusively chatting with bright, clever, insightful, well-heeled, neurotic-as-hell-but-in-an-interesting-sort-of-way patients within the friendly confines of my office.
Problems arose. For one thing, the 45 minute-hour seemed to to me to last a week. I also liked treating hospital patients (please don’t tell my Residency Director). I was pretty good at handling patients other therapists often chose to refer to others than treat themselves. I was, for example, treating self-cutters before self-cutters were a feature in the Tempo section of the Trib every four months and was the token doctor-expert on the Donahue show2 about self-mutilation. And, it turned out that gladly accepting patients others gladly referred, working 6 ½ days a week without a vacation for two years, and hiring employees to do the work I didn’t like to do was a fiscally successful way to do business.
Of course, life is never that simple. Some patients deteriorated instead of improving, and Sears sometimes rejected Julie’s ideas. Those two years were part of Chicago’s Ice Age when the winters featured wind chills of -50 and that continuously falling, never-melting snow. The first year, one local TV weatherman was tracking the accumulated snowfall to a life-size cardboard silhouette of 7′ 2″Artis Gilmore, who was then playing out the last years of his career with the Bulls. By January, the snow was towering over Artis’s Afro. Since Artis was almost 1 ½ times as tall as Julie, … well, you can see the problem. 
Nonetheless, our won-loss record for these two seasons was spectacular. While we never developed either the credentials or ego to think of ourselves as Tom Wolfe’s Masters Of The Universe, we were sometimes able to maintain the Look, I’m a stylish young professional living large in Chicago pose for minutes at a time before giggling. What can I say? We were both from the sticks, we were doing well for ourselves, and were together. We both worked long hours, hit restaurants for most dinners, attended hospital parties and balls, and, thanks to Julie, made batches of friends. Julie was always flying to New York or Philly or wherever for Sears. I was seducing referral sources at fancy-schmancy restaurants. We joined the East Bank Club. We jogged along the bike paths beside the Lake. We developed a complex system for keeping track of who had read what sections of the Sunday papers in bed.
We even bought furniture for the apartment (we weren’t a great advertisement for either careful or extravagant shopping – in the middle of a snowstorm, I drove around the block while Julie ran into a shop that ran an ad in the The Reader that advised, “We Sell Sofas,” and bought a sofa). Shortly after our high-rise, bland, modern, functional apartment was furnished, we moved across the street to a much hipper breed of dwelling, a condo in a landmark building (i.e., a building that prohibited those incredibly anachronistic, incredibly efficient storm windows) that substituted character for convenience and charm for working appliances. We were so cool.
The core of our joyfulness, however, was the time we spent together – talking, reading, hopping in the sack, and, especially, planning for the future.
And, as Walter Cronkite was saying in those days, that’s the way it is.
Or, at least, that’s the way it was until Julie decided we wanted to get married.
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[Next Installment Of Julie's Story:Vows]
[Previous Installment Of Julie's Story: The Gift Of The Magna Cum Laude]
[First Installment Of Julie's Story: This Is How A Love Story Began]
Footnotes
- 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. ~back~
- For the youngsters out there, Donahue played John The Baptist to Oprah’s divinity ~back~
