A Reason to Believe (10 page)

She was teaching him how to behave, but she took care not to humiliate him. It was a moment of clarity wrapped in love and compassion, and Reg, who later graduated from Harvard Law School, became a partner at the law firm where I once worked, and served with great distinction as a federal district judge in Boston, never forgot it.

Love, I have learned, is like success itself: What matters most is not what you get but what you give. Selfless love is the most powerful. How you treat friends and family defines your own character and creates a ripple effect that can travel far and wide. That goodwill, that spirit of helping others, is the foundation of any community. It unifies and inspires. Sustaining loving friendships can test your patience and exhaust your resources, and “tough love” is sometimes required. But the most personal connections are sacred.

As a husband, father, and member of a community, I strive to honor those closest to me with love and respect and to create a home that is a haven. I want our house to feel to others the way the homes of A. O. and Aubrey Smith and June Elam felt to me. Some days, I believe I’ve reached those ideals; other times, I’ve been an abject failure. But the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of the people you care about most is a blessing itself. I had to learn to love that way, to understand both what you get
from it and what you give to it. My wife, Diane, has taught me more about that than anyone.

After I graduated from Harvard Law School in 1982, I headed off for Los Angeles to clerk for Stephen Reinhardt, a recently appointed judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Judge Reinhardt was a gruff, rumpled, often surly, sometimes high-handed man who chewed off the ends of his pencils while he worked and could not even make coffee on his own. He was also brilliant, with a deep sense of justice and powers of concentration that I had never seen before. Clerking for him was a challenge because he tested and reexamined every aspect of every case, trying to get it right, and he required that his clerks be just as assiduous.

I made my way in this new job and new city and ever so slowly began to make some friends. One of the outgoing clerks was a delightful old soul named Robert Hubbell, who had recently married a generous, good-humored firecracker named Jill. They invited me to dinner with a friend of theirs, Debbie Barak-Milgrom, whom Rob had known in law school. Not long thereafter, the Hubbells and Debbie invited me to a Halloween party and insisted that I dress in costume. I reluctantly agreed.

I wore a full-length caftan from Nigeria and no shoes, smeared war paint across my face, and carried a Masai spear. I thought I looked pretty good until I walked into
the party and realized that I was the only one in costume. The joke was on me. Little did I know that the surprises were just beginning.

The entire party was an elaborate scheme for me to meet Diane—to engineer a chance encounter—and I was the only one out of the loop. Debbie was Diane’s close friend, and she thought Diane and I were meant for each other. However, my clerkship was for only one year; I was then heading to San Francisco to join a big downtown law firm. So Debbie, moving quickly, helped arrange the Halloween party. Diane knew why she was there and had been told all about me, including that my time in Los Angeles was limited. Everyone else knew the purpose of the party as well. I, on the other hand, dressed as a mock African warrior, was blissfully ignorant.

The light finally dawned during the pumpkin carving contest, when Diane and I were paired. The prize was a single bottle of champagne, “to be drunk,” according to the hosts, “at some private time.” We won, of course, but the contest was shamelessly rigged. We could have stabbed the pumpkin with my Masai spear and won.

I can’t deny that I was delighted by my good fortune—how often are you set up with a beautiful, educated, friendly woman, smartly attired in a black silk pantsuit and pearl earrings—but I was also shy and a little embarrassed by my appearance. I didn’t ignore Diane, but I was too timid to pay her any special attention. When the party
finally wrapped up, we were at the door and Diane had our bottle of champagne. I guess she was getting impatient.

“Listen,” she told me, “I’m going to take this bottle, and maybe one day I’ll call you and we can share it.”

“Sure,” I said, “but I’ve got a better one at home.”

I was shy, not clueless.

I got Diane’s work number and called after a few weeks of screwing up my nerve. We got together for lunch at a Japanese restaurant. I was nervous and clumsy, chattering on about myself and getting precious little information about her. But my favorable first impressions were all confirmed: She was bright, a wonderful listener, serious, warm, and down to earth. She drove me back to the courthouse on her way to another appointment. As she let me out, I thought it was going well enough to ask her out for a real date.

“That was fun,” I said. “When can I see you again?”

“You name it,” she told me. Okay, breathe. She’s interested.

“How about Saturday?” I asked eagerly. “We can go hiking.”

“Saturday’s not good for me. I’m moving.”

“Great, I’d be happy to help,” I lied, thinking that’s as good a way as any to get to know each other.

Diane then looked straight at me, puzzled. “I don’t think my husband would understand that.”

“Your what?” She wasn’t wearing a ring, and I never imagined that she was married.

“My husband.”

“You’re married?”

“Yes, but I’m moving out on Saturday.”

Diane was stunned as well. She thought that I had been told about her circumstances, just as she had been fully briefed about mine. She was separating from her husband for the third and final time, preparing for a divorce. It was a tense moment all around. Diane later said that I had a look of disgust on my face. But I was more nonplussed than anything else. I had moved to California to start fresh, but this was a little too fresh for me. I would never date a woman who was married or at least still with her husband. Diane realized I had no idea that her marriage was long dead. She worried that I thought of her as a loose woman, out flirting while she had other commitments at home.

I got out of the car quickly. Neither of us knew quite what to say.

“Why don’t you call me when you’re free,” I said. She was silent and nearly in tears.

That Saturday afternoon, my telephone rang. It was Diane; she had moved into a condo.

“I’m free,” she said.

The next day we took a long hike together in the Santa Monica Mountains—with two other clerks. In fact, for the first several dates I always asked another couple or friend along. I just didn’t know the right thing to do, how to reconcile
my attraction to this remarkable woman with knowing that she was married. Finally, Diane insisted that the two of us have a date alone. Someone had recommended a jazz club to her. The music and the food were both dreadful, but we finally started to open up to each other. In the coming weeks, over dinners of red snapper at a beachside café we came to like or late suppers after work at a French bistro not far from the site of that fateful Halloween party, Diane described the events that led to her unhappy and even threatening marriage. I listened with both sympathy and shock.

Diane had been raised in New York. Her mother, the daughter of West Indian immigrants, was a schoolteacher who also did the cooking, cleaning, washing, and other household chores with a sense of wifely duty and determination. Her father, a master electrician and former navy man, was a model of precision and rectitude, a stickler for detail, and a strict disciplinarian. Her early years in Brooklyn and Queens were, in some ways, similar to mine. Her family lived with her grandparents and extended family. Her parents loved her though her mother was rarely outwardly affectionate. Diane was shy and diligent, a bookworm who found her greatest fulfillment in the classroom.

She was also painfully self-conscious. One morning about three weeks into her second-grade year, she was suddenly advanced to the third grade because she was so far ahead of her second-grade peers. Petite and uncomfortable, Diane was escorted by the principal and introduced to her
new class. As a gesture of welcome, she was invited to lead the class in the “morning exercises”—the daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance and singing of the national anthem. “Morning exercises” were unfamiliar to second graders, however, so Diane misinterpreted the invitation and started doing jumping jacks in front of the class. Even the teacher broke down in hysterics. Diane ran from the classroom, mortified. She would not return until her father brought her the next day.

Only sixteen when she graduated from high school, her parents forbade her from going to college outside the New York City public university system—or living away from home, for that matter—so she enrolled at Queens College of the City University of New York and studied early childhood education. She graduated with honors when she was twenty.

Diane found her affirmation and self-worth by teaching kindergarten and third grade in the New York City public schools. Because she was the junior teacher, she got the toughest classrooms, where the kids had little support at home. She poured herself into her job, but her position was eliminated during New York City’s fiscal crisis in the late 1970s, and that layoff still left a painful expression on her face. She also occasionally worked summers at an advertising agency, in human resources. There, she met Bill Whiting, an advertising rep for a magazine. Fifteen years older than Diane, he was a real charmer, taking her to elegant lunches and dinners, flattering her, and paying her
a kind of attention that was new to her. He validated her beauty and desirability in ways that no one else had before. Diane was both thrilled and enchanted. Before too long, and over the muted disapproval of her parents, she agreed to marry him.

Newly married and with her job in New York gone, Diane and Bill decided to move to Los Angeles and make a new start. It was a brave move for Diane, going so far from her extended family and friends, though she felt ready to leave the nest and was encouraged by her husband to do so. She enrolled in Loyola Law School, where she blossomed. Focusing on labor and employment law, she realized—perhaps for the first time—how much she was capable of. She excelled at law school, won awards, and, upon graduating, landed a position at one of the city’s most prestigious law firms.

Just as she was discovering her talents as a lawyer, Diane was also discovering that Bill was a fraud. Many of the things he had told her turned out to be false. His college degree did not exist. His nest egg was empty. He had said he was close to his two children from previous relationships, but it turned out that he was estranged from them both.

With a lot of coaxing, Diane described to me, sometimes in a barely audible voice, how he became increasingly argumentative, disparaging, demanding, and verbally hostile. He humiliated her publicly, belittled her in front of friends, and slowly destroyed her self-confidence. Despite
her academic and professional accomplishments, Diane was unwilling to assert herself at home. She had learned, growing up with her own parents, that women were supposed to be supportive, passive.

Bullied relentlessly and with no instinct to fight back, Diane became a victim to her deepest fears about her own worth. Here was this poised, downtown lawyer on the rise in professional circles, admired and relied on by the senior partners, who was barely holding it together under the surface. People are so much more than they seem, I thought. The shame she felt poured out with each new layer of her story. So did the fear. And with good reason.

One night, she told me, she came home late from the office with work still to do. Bill was waiting for her to make his dinner. She said she had to prepare for an arbitration hearing the following day, so he would have to fix his own dinner. She sat down at the kitchen table and began her work when he took out a gun and pointed it at her. She had not even known he owned a gun.

“You’re going to cook me dinner,” he said threateningly.

Unnerved, Diane cooked him pasta while he drank heavily. Once he had eaten and passed out, she took the gun, wrapped it in a towel, and dropped it off at a friend’s house. When Bill awoke the next morning, he flew into a rage, pushed Diane up against a wall, and grabbed her around the neck. A month or so later, he got another gun. He became increasingly abusive, physically and psychologically.
He pointed his loaded gun at her again and sexually assaulted her.

Diane soon left Bill, but not for long. She had come from a family and custom where marriage was sacred and divorce carried shame. Walking away wasn’t easy, but staying away was even harder. After Bill apologized and promised to change his ways, Diane returned. The pattern repeated itself, and she left and returned a second time. They tried couples counseling, but, breaking from professional protocol, the therapist told Diane privately to get out of her marriage.

By then, Diane was afraid to leave—she feared for her life. It was obvious to me that she felt under siege, fragile, defenseless. She still functioned at a high level in her law practice, but outside work, her self-esteem lay in shambles. Bill had redefined who she was and made her feel as if she were the ugliest, most unworthy person in the world. She could not envision her life beyond surviving her immediate despair, and she had to fight the scourge of depression—the sleepless nights, the loss of appetite, the draining of all life’s pleasures—each day.

Her personal trauma was not evident at the Halloween party. She glided around the room, talked easily with guests, and laughed at my lame jokes. In retrospect, she was a supreme example of the way people lock their secrets away so deeply, buried beneath layers of shame. Diane had been married for six mostly miserable years, and Debbie—one of the few people in whom she confided—had just
about prevailed on her to leave Bill once and for all, even helping to arrange another place for her to live. Now Debbie was arranging a new love life.

In addition to seeing a beautiful, capable woman, I sensed there was something deep underneath: a tender heart, a beautiful soul. Our courtship became a slow journey of sharing and of gradually gaining trust. Maybe falling in love is always like that. But instead of falling for perfection, for an idealized version of what romance should be, I was learning to look past flaws, real and perceived, past the deep apprehensions that Diane brought to the relationship. At some level, Diane was reassured that I wanted to spend time with her. It contradicted all of the negativity and self-doubt that her husband had filled her with. I thought she was remarkable and said so. Slowly, she began to believe me. It is also true that I was learning to love in a more mature way, not with all the sweet-sounding harps and addled sighs and sentimental valentines, but in the slow, intimate, unconditional way that lasts. Each of us made the other better.