Patty appreciated my love of history, ability to dress well, being “debonair,” as she put it, for turning out well-balanced and kind, despite having lost my parents before I could even remember them. She called me a mensch, one of the best compliments I ever received.
It pleased her that I loved ethnic food and had a very dry sense of humor and possessed an eclectic past that included working for five years as a deputy sheriff trained by a tough older cop named Peralta. I had published my first book, Rocky Hard Times: The Great Depression in the Intermountain West, 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.