The Night Detectives - страница 19

and it had been favorably reviewed. This also pleased her. We made a sophisticated, good-looking couple. But I knew I was marrying up.

She spoke French well. Not well enough to satisfy the most obnoxious waiter in Paris, but her French was better than my Spanish. Thanks to Patty, I learned fun and useful phrases: cherchez la femme, which proved to be true in cracking one cold case. Dragueur, a skirt chaser. Terribles simplificateurs: the world was full of those, Arizona especially. Billets-doux: love letters, the writing of which she excelled. La petit mort: orgasm. The vocabulary she had taught me was coming back now with the sea breeze.

It was things like this that made me cluelessly happy being with her.

I was one of the few who were allowed to call her Patty. To the rest of the world, she was Patricia. She teased me about spray-painting her name on a wall of I-5. For a long time, I wondered if we would have stayed together if I had committed that simple act of vandalism, decorating the concrete spaghetti with eight letters, leaving drivers to wonder what passion had stirred a man to do such a thing?

A man who would have done that could have kept up when she got on tenure track at the University of California at San Diego, an infinitely more prestigious appointment. He would not have been content being a good teacher, nor would he have bridled at the intentionally dull and social-science-y conventions of academic historiography.

He would have realized that even if I didn’t feel in competition with her, she expected me to overachieve, as her father had demanded of her. The impetuous one with the spray paint would have done more than appreciate, support, and learn from her seemingly infinite avocations, from cooking to film history and painting. He would have tried harder to match her imaginative gift giving even though it couldn’t be done.

That man sure as hell would have focused on publishing more so as to ensure tenure at second-rate San Diego State.

Who knows? I can argue this history one way and then the other. Participants don’t usually make good historians. Even Churchill had his flaws. As for Patty, she was needy and broken, too. She was as insecure as I was. Our insecurities together acted as an accelerant to burn up our marriage. I taught her things of the world, too, made her happy for a time. The collapse of our marriage wasn’t all my fault. Just mostly my fault.

I am too close to the events to recount them dispassionately.

I do know two things. One is that we married too soon. We weren’t the people we would become. And I know a simple, transcendent fact…

She was the Glory Fuck of My Young Life.

Now I stood at the end of the same pier, the longest on the West Coast if I remembered correctly. A man fished off the south side and pairs of lovers strolled out toward me. My chest was tight and I could feel my heart trying to make its escape, my throat tightening. It was merely a panic attack. I knew that now. They never came in situations where a normal person would panic, only when I was quiet and alone. If I couldn’t stop them, at least I could get away from other people so the attacks wouldn’t cause me to do something inappropriate. Like tell the truth. Whatever.

I thought again about Patty. Contrary to Peralta’s baiting, I wasn’t afraid of seeing her. It would be nice, actually, to know she was happy.

As for my native prudence, that had gone away in the preceding months. Now I had barged into a stranger’s apartment and assaulted a man with a move that could kill, and I wasn’t even a cop anymore. Get me a can of spray paint.

I wondered if she remarried and had children.

Now it was hard to imagine that lost love as even real, especially after Lindsey.

I remembered the Fussell book Patty and I had both been reaching for. Writing about World War I, he meditated about how our age couldn’t understand why hundreds of thousands of British soldiers had gone “over the top” to certain death from German machine gunners for something as abstract as