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…
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 honor. But for them, that sense of honor and obligation was as real as our age, drowning in illegitimacy and irony, is for us.
What a pity. Quel dommage.
I had brought Lindsey to O.B. exactly once, when we had first become a couple and I worried that I was falling for her too fast, this magical younger woman with the fair skin and nearly black hair. She had browsed the postcards and made fun of the tourists. The memories caused me to pull out my iPhone and text her:
“I’m in San Diego with Peralta, on a case.”