THE PLEASURE OF HIS COMPANY
Death forces cold decisions. Five years ago, as I waited in my husband’s hospital room the night before he died, I was numb with fear. The doctor in the intensive care unit had been blunt. “Mrs. Wyatt,” he said, “we need to talk about what your husband would have wanted done.” I reached out instinctively to my husband, the person who had made bearable so many painful things over the years, and for a short while was reassured by the warmth of his hand. The reassurance was illusory, however, as any reassurance must be when it comes from the dying. The doctor and I talked about what had to be done.
My husband, nothing if not a practical man, had detailed years earlier the final medical decisions he wished to be made on his behalf, sparing me now some measure of pain and uncertainty. Indeed, he had laid out with such precision the circumstances under which he wished to have life support measures removed that the attending physician cited his directives to the medical students and residents as a model of how such things should be drawn up. Dr. Wyatt, he told them, was a scientist as well as a doctor, and it showed in the precision of his orders.
Richard, I told myself, was also a teacher, and he would have been pleased to be teaching in death as he had in life. He would have laughed and said that, all things considered, he would have preferred to be alive and to have left this particular kind of teaching to someone else. The warmth of his hand may have been illusory, but the recollection of his wit was not. For a moment I felt the solace and pleasure of his company.
The decision to sign the papers to end Richard’s life was difficult but peculiarly straightforward. His medical condition and the specifics of his advance directives made signing, however haunting, inevitable. It was a final and necessary act. More wrenching was the decision of where to spend the last night we would have together. There should have been no question at all. Every human instinct, every impulse of love and friendship, told me I should be with him at the end. It did not matter that he was unconscious and would not be conscious again. The desire to hold and console, to accompany, is ancient for cause: it is human; it is who we are. Left to my own ways, before Richard became a part of how I faced the world and my disquietude, I would have been by him all night, not willing or able to sleep. I could not have imagined otherwise. To spend our final night apart seemed monstrous.
Yet it was Richard’s gift to me that I thought that night as Richard would have thought, not as others would think or as I would once have thought. I thought of sleep, of practical things. You cannot afford to lose sleep, he had said to me so often, in so many places: You are staying up too late; you are pushing it. You will get manic. Take something. Get some sleep.
Medication, love, sleep: these were the things Richard had shown would keep my mind in check. His love would soon be gone, at least that form of his love that was physical and more obviously comprehensible. It was left to me to take care of myself, to attend to the practicalities that up to that point he had taken onto himself.
If I stayed with him in the hospital, a sleepless night would be followed by others in the difficult days to come; inevitably, the loss of sleep would push my brain over its edge. I might rail against such weakness, but it would do no good. I had been down that particular defiant and destructive path too many times to delude myself now. By all odds and within short order, I would become manic again. Having lost my heart, I would then lose my mind. Richard would be dead, I would be ill, a funeral still would need to be planned, and I still would have to live with the fact that he would be in the ground, cold and inaccessible. Everything—Richard, my sanity, my long-sought peace—would be gone. To realize a tolerable future, I had to turn away from the man who had made my future possible. It was expedient and an act of betrayal; it was rational in a way that Richard was; it was preserving.
I kissed Richard on his forehead, left him alone in a room filled with monitors that blinked numbers going in the wrong direction, and told the nurses how to reach me. Richard and I spent our last night as husband and wife apart, in cold and separate beds, an unthinkable distance from what we had known together for nearly twenty years. Richard was going to die the next day, and his quick mind and sheltering ways were going to die with him.
Richard was first and last a doctor and a scientist. Nothing else in his life carried matching weight. He loved science unreservedly from the time he was a young child until he died; no one could compete with the pleasure he found in grappling with questions provoked by nature or the human brain. I loved this about him. The same mind that served Richard well in science, along with a droll wit and a remarkable tolerance for diverse ways of going through life, made living with him a delight. Or, if not always a delight, certainly never dull. I cannot remember a time in the years we had together that I was bored. Nearly out the door on more than one occasion, certainly. But bored, never.
Early on, Richard wrote to me that he was new to love. He said this on many occasions and felt it to be an important part of who we were, a source of pleasure as well as vulnerability. At first I found this difficult to believe. He was forty-five and I was thirty-eight when we met; neither of us was new to life or to romantic entanglements. He was quietly but unquestionably charming, easy on the eyes, and confident in who he was. His reserve was seductive, as was his intelligence, and he was the kind of interested listener one waits for but seldom finds. He was catnip to women yet, savingly, largely oblivious to that fact.
We hit it off straightaway. We had many things in common—curiosity about the natural world, interest in the customs and love lives of our colleagues, and fascination with the ways the brain can veer off its tracks—and we made each other laugh. We were both optimists who bounded into our days with the belief that something interesting was certain to happen. We were inclined to find pleasure in whatever it was we were doing.
In time we came to realize that each of us also felt that we had been given a second chance at life: he by surviving Hodgkin’s disease some ten years earlier, and me by having lived through mania, paralyzing depressions, and what should have been a lethal suicide attempt. We knew we had been saved by the grace of science and good doctors and we felt that we owed back because of this. We didn’t assume that we had an endless shot at life, nor that life should be easy. Both of us had worked hard to get where we were, but we also had been lucky in opportunity and circumstance.
Richard, severely impaired by dyslexia, knew early on that he would have to work around difficulty. This first came home to him when he was in the second grade and he discovered that his class was divided into reading groups designated as “Eagles,” “Hawks,” “Owls,” and “Robins.” The Robins, it was clear, could scarcely put their books the right way up, and he was, most decidedly, a Robin. Not only a Robin, but at the bottom of the bottom of the Robins. He could read only with great difficulty and meager retention; his spelling was dreadful and his handwriting worse. He had, as he put it, the fine motor coordination of a clam.
Richard’s attitude toward this was typical of how he approached problems throughout the rest of his life: he was philosophical and he worked harder. His stepfather, an antitrust lawyer in Chicago who had a passion for astronomy, encouraged him to learn about science and to visit the city’s great science museums. These museums, perfectly suited to a mind more comfortable with ideas and images than words, became a second home to him. Neither he nor his stepfather equated his inability to read with a lack of intelligence, and Richard slowly worked his way through the science books in the local library.
Throughout college, medical school, internship, residency, and his scientific career, he had to add four or five extra hours of work to each day. He accepted this as a fact of life, grateful to be able to pursue his ambitions. I never heard him complain about the inordinate amount of time it took him to read or write scientific articles; nor did he ever beg off reviewing the many manuscripts of the young scientists who trained in his laboratory. He felt he had had the advantage of inheriting a good mind and receiving an excellent education; he thought himself greatly fortunate in life. For the most part, he laughed about his frequent misspellings and misreadings and, once successful in his career, spent a considerable amount of time encouraging young people with similar difficulties to persevere.
Richard’s combination of intellect and discipline paid off: he received his medical degree from Johns Hopkins, did his psychiatric residency at Harvard, and became Chief of Neuropsychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health. Along the way he wrote or coauthored eight hundred scientific papers and six books. He was often asked, How dyslexic can you really be and write so much? He would laugh and say, Trust me, very. And he was. He struggled to write each sentence of each paper and had to reread, and then read again, medical and scientific articles. Each prescription he wrote he had to have read back to him by his patients in order to catch possible errors in dosage. Nothing, except ideas and enthusiasm, came easily to him.
Life to Richard was an adventure made up of worlds to be discovered and problems to be solved. The more intractable the problem, the more he dug in, mulled, tussled, and persevered, rotating the problem within his mind until a new way of looking at it emerged. He tackled with discipline and originality what my mind, given to restlessness and quick frustration, too easily skittered away from. His brain was constantly in motion, and little within its hailing distance was left unexamined. This curiosity and persistence paid off most clearly in medicine and science, where he made fundamental contributions to the understanding and treatment of schizophrenia and other diseases of the brain. He also found fulfillment in being a doctor to patients severely ill with schizophrenia. Although most of his practice was as a consultant, which meant he generally did not see his patients more than once or twice, he loved his clinical work and was painstakingly thorough in his diagnostic workups and recommendations for treatment. He and I saw many patients together, and I was struck by his gentleness and patience, as well as by how he encouraged them to ask him about things they did not understand or share with him fears that they might have.
When Richard received the first Margaret Byrd Rawson Award for dyslexic adults of exceptional professional achievement, he emphasized that he saw his learning problems as a disguised blessing. “I learned to fail and pick myself up at an early age, which is enormously practical,” he said. “I know I am not like most of my competent colleagues, who can think linearly. I learn spirally, coming back to a topic from many directions over a long period of time. Because I must continuously relearn a subject, there is more opportunity to make associations that others might miss. Most important for me, learning is a long-term investment and requires a philosophy of life.” Richard’s victories in life were not at the quarter mile but at the mile and a half. He was in the race for however long it took. Once Richard decided a problem was worth his time and effort, he never gave up. Fortunately for me, I appear to have been that kind of problem.
Richard’s curiosity and imperturbability made the task of loving me easier than it otherwise would have been. From the beginning, he kept close to him those things in me that he loved; toward my more disturbing qualities he kept, as best he could, an attitude of detached bemusement. He was able to do this well enough to keep us together, even when circumstances made it hard. A constitutional tendency to see the positive in people played an essential part as well. After our first Christmas, when I was living in London, he wrote to me about the challenges in our relationship, but presented them in an altogether wonderful context: “There are two Christmas presents that I will always remember,” he said. “My electric train, circa 1946, and my trip to Kay via London—shall I compare Kay to an electric train? I shall. How fast could I run the train without its falling off the track? When it did fall off, it was picked up, placed back on the track, and ultimately the banking steepened. So I am with you.” It took patience and skill to bank the slope, and Richard did it particularly well.
We were temperamentally different in critical respects—his passion for work over people; my intensity and less settled ways—but at the start of our life together it was my manic-depressive (bipolar) illness that created the greatest misunderstanding and discord. The disease took a serious toll on us before it eventually stabilized and, had it not been for Richard’s light touch and formidable intellect, his adept way of dealing with the illness and with me, we would not have made it. Mental illness sabotages the best of relationships and, even in the most steadfast, generates an unrelenting bone-weariness. Early on, we found it hard.
Moods are contagious; they spread from those afflicted to those who are not. It is rare for even an experienced clinician to remain unaffected by a manic or depressed patient. For those who do not have the protective cloak of professional training, or who are personally involved, it is next to impossible to maintain equanimity. Moods are too insinuating, too persuasive: despair begets despair; suspicion and anger give rise to paranoia and rage. Concerned disengagement is the Holy Grail at such times, but obtaining and holding on to such a state is difficult; to remain impervious to provocation flies against all odds and is scarcely reasonable to expect from human nature.
In the early years of Richard’s and my relationship my moods still lurched about. I was not manic or depressed in the same full-blown manner I had been when first treated for my illness—lithium saw to that—but now and again I would be swept up by a light mania, high-flying and captivating, which would then spend itself downward into a short but dangerous, often highly irritable period of depression. Brevity in itself buys no protection. Graham Greene observed that a Mediterranean storm may be over in a few hours, but while it lasts, it is savage enough to drown a shipful of men. Such is the ferocity of moods. I could live with my mercurial moods, but it was not clear that someone else could, or should.
Richard, new not only to love but to the day-to-day realities of the illness that came with that love, brought unique strengths to the situation. He was clinically and scientifically knowledgeable about manic depression, and well aware of its genetic basis; he was not inclined to attribute to character what he knew to be disease. He was curious by nature, in the habit of careful observation, and he possessed a charitable slant on odd behavior. He was able to make me laugh in the midst of truly awful situations, and he loved me in a way I never questioned.
Once, during a fierce argument about something that seemed consequential at the time but that I cannot remember now, I picked up a small, fine-porcelain rabbit, a gift from my aunt, and hurled it against a wall in our bedroom. The rabbit, which had gone by the name of Snowball, shattered into tiny pieces of white, unrecognizable except for the better part of one ear, flecked with pink, and a tiny paw. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Richard, who had a stunned look on his face. Then he smiled. Seeking to avoid provoking me further, he turned his back to me and struggled to little avail to keep from laughing. The harder he tried, the more impossible it was for him not to laugh; I could see his shoulders shaking. “Too much lithium,” he said, after a long pause. “Your aim is off.”
It was hopeless. I tried to keep from laughing for as long as I could, but, in the end, the two of us fell to the floor in fits of laughter. My rage was no match for Richard’s wit. The next evening, when Richard came home from work, he gave me a small package; in it was a white ceramic rabbit, purchased at a local garden shop. Richard had written a note and tied it around the rabbit’s neck: “In memory of Snowball,” it read. “Who also went to pieces.” “Snowflake,” as we christened her, sits on my desk even now, unthrown.
Richard brought science, as well as humor, to bear on my problem with moods. He kept fastidious notes on everything he could measure: he rated and charted my moods against my serum lithium levels; my moods against my menstrual cycle; my moods and lithium levels against the seasons of the year; my thyroid lab values against the dosages of my lithium and thyroid medication. During one particularly turbulent period, he made morning and evening ratings of my moods and recorded them on a chart that eventually filled up with red and green and black dots. I clearly had become a project to him, one that was useful in figuring out patterns in my illness, as well as creating enough interest to keep his mind engaged. It built sufficient distance between him and my moods to help tame the beast.
On several occasions, Richard went with me to see my psychiatrist. He went to learn and, on occasion, to present his perspective on things; he did not go in order to second-guess my doctor’s reasoning. He respected my psychiatrist’s clinical acumen, and I never heard him suggest a change in medication or treatment plan. He did ask my doctor for suggestions on how best to handle my depression and agitation.
He took particularly seriously the importance of sleep in maintaining my mood stability. This was in part because he had studied and written extensively about the biology of sleep, but in larger part because he had observed firsthand what happened when I worked too late and slept too little. Mild mania had a way of feathering in, gently and imperceptibly, when I stayed up past midnight. Unless brought down by medication, which Richard first had to convince me to take, my high moods and proliferating enthusiasms quickly escalated into a serious clinical problem. Whenever I traveled to England or Scotland, or was many time zones away from home, I knew it was only a matter of time until Richard would call and ask me, “Are you asleep yet?” Nearly always wide awake, I would say, “Of course I’m asleep. You woke me up.” He would laugh and say, “Go to sleep.” Then, an hour or so later he would call again and we would make our way through a variation of the same conversation. It was nimbly done for the most part—neither badgering nor sharp-edged—and it made a critical difference in my getting better.
Yet, with all of this, he and I found my illness immensely difficult at times. For good cause, I had lived alone rather than have to deal with someone else’s reactions to it. At times there was no facile way to handle the realities of my disease. One evening when we were talking in his study, Richard asked me about the symptoms of neuroleptic malignant syndrome, a rare but potentially lethal reaction to antipsychotic medications. I thought at first that he was bringing it up in the context of a book he was writing for general psychiatrists—it was a syndrome he had studied and written about—but there was something about his use of words, “Were you to experience this” rather than “When patients experience this,” that put me on edge. Glancing around his office, I saw his black doctor’s bag in the corner of the room, sitting on top of a file cabinet. It seemed odd, although I had never thought about it before. Why did he have his doctor’s bag in his home study instead of at the office we rented together to see patients?
I asked him if I could see what he kept inside his bag. He was uncomfortable with the idea and only reluctantly took it down for me to open. There was not much inside—prescription pads, his stethoscope, a blood pressure cuff, a reflex hammer—but after rummaging around for a while, I found at the bottom of the bag what I think I knew I would find. Beneath the instruments of his practice lay a syringe and a vial of antipsychotic medication.
I didn’t have to ask. It was for me, in case I became manic. Seeing the syringe triggered memories of being forcibly medicated after I first had become psychotic years earlier. I felt trapped and, more fundamentally, betrayed. Turning around, I saw Richard, who, like me, looked as though he had nowhere to run. He was a husband but also a doctor, and he had to handle, as best he could, an illness he thought was unlikely to recur but might. It was a dreary illness, and both of us had had our fill.
After a long silence, he spoke with an unnerving calm. “Kay,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.” He was silent for a long while. “Medicine is imperfect.” He paused again. “I am imperfect,” he said. “You are imperfect.” He looked tired and sad as he sat down at his desk. Neither of us said anything for a long time, caught in the cold realities of the choices we had. Then he added very quietly, “Love is imperfect.” It was the most true, most chilling thing I had heard about dealing with the uncertainties of an illness such as mine. Richard was doing the best he could; we both were. Love was imperfect, but it was what we had.
Things changed radically for us, for me, that evening. I had to take it on faith that Richard’s intentions were good and his judgment sound. He never gave me lasting cause to think otherwise.
Over time, Richard and I discovered what it took for my mind to thrive and for madness to be kept at bay. It was hard-fought-for knowledge for both of us, imperfect and ferociously protected. My brain, as Richard explained it to himself and to me, was a delicate ecosystem, a pond of subtle alkalinities, which was kept alive through a finely honed mix of lithium and love and sleep, or, as he imagined it, “water grasses and dragon-flies, and a snail or two to tidy up.” Like Snoopy, whom he adored, he constantly rearranged his mental world, and mine, to make life more interesting.
From time to time, as the mood would take him, Richard would add new elements to my mental pond. Perhaps we should put in a koi someday, he said once, apropos of nothing, before we went to sleep. What did I think about adding a water bear, he asked on another occasion. Perhaps the koi and the water bear would hit it off, or perhaps the koi would eat the water bear. One didn’t know. We would have to think about it. Sleep and medication, love and work—all in exquisite proportion—were the koi and dragonflies of my mind. Richard tended this pond with a blend of science and whimsy, and, for as long as he was alive, kept it hale and safe.
Richard’s acceptance of me was deep, but it was not entire. At times he was enraged when I was ill; at others, he was bewildered or coolly distant. He was not, however, fundamentally judgmental. He conceptualized my illness as unbidden, painful, and something I tried hard to master. He believed manic depression to be a complex interaction of disease and self and did not reduce its complexity beyond what was necessary to try to understand it.
“Diseases or disorders have their own character,” he wrote to me after a particularly difficult time, “but they are present in a character. They do not take place outside of a being. Tuberculosis is only a bacterium unless it is in someone’s lungs. Similarly, a person’s character takes on the character of a disease. In your case things are even more complicated than with tuberculosis, because the disease is in your genes—thus you have never been without it and never will be. It is laced into you like a strand in a bowl of angel hair [pasta]. One does not fall in love with a gene but with all that is in the bowl, all that ever happened to it, and all that it affected.”
He described in his letter the debilitating treatment he had undergone years earlier for Hodgkin’s disease, an aggressive combination of radiation and chemotherapy that had cured him of his disease but at considerable cost. “We all long to be some whole we thought we were in the past, the self we were before becoming ill,” he wrote. “The diseases and the magic bullets have left their traces or scars but they are not a part of me in the way yours are. All the more so because yours are integral to your personality. Because of this I am luckier than you; I can love a manic-depressive in a way you cannot love a Hodgkin’s disease.”
Richard’s arms broke many falls for me. There were times, especially early on, when I would be hit by despair that had no good reason and gave no quarter and all hope would bleed out of me. “In the midst of seemingly unbelievable happiness with you, London, life, I find myself awful and dark and full of bleak thoughts and feelings,” I wrote to him when I was living in England. “It came on as I suppose it always does, with a sense of tiredness, then the long deep clouds and finally just despair and Why again? What’s the point? One’s born just to die; feeling good is unreal and only to mock and haunt one when ill. And for a brief while I thought, I have Richard, and if he were here he would hold me and make love to me, make me a cup of tea, give me a pill to let me sleep through the hard rough part. There are moments when you provide a minute of sweetness and belief, and then the blackness comes again. I shall be done for one of these times. No matter what I do, this illness will always bring me to my knees. I accumulate sorrow and grief inside, which only wait until the next time to come out again, to remind me how always tides go out once in.”
These times of reemergent depression were hard when they came, but our life together was far from grim. On the contrary. I was well and in high spirits most of the years I knew Richard. We had more fun than we knew what to do with. We worked together, saw patients in consultation, and collaborated on many papers and professional projects. We each in our different ways had a chaotic mind and we found a calming quality in the company of each other.
Richard often told me that my acceptance of and love for him created a world of stillness and constancy he had never known. This, given my temperament, I found astonishing. I suggested one day that surely he was being ironic, but he said he wasn’t. Perhaps, I asked, I was soothing only in comparison with his unfortunate marriage or other fraught relationships he had had? No, he said; there may be an element of truth in that, but not much. Possibly I acted as a stimulant does, in a paradoxical manner, to bring order to his desultory mind? No, he said, you create a quiet world for me. “Your stillness is a sanctuary,” he once wrote to me. “The passion may in time turn me to mush and is extremely attractive. However, it is the capacity for understanding or accepting that is most important. This acceptance is the amalgamating force that makes me love you.” It is strange, I think now, that love could soothe and draw together such different souls, and provide for them such hope, such happiness.
We complemented each other well. Richard was a reserved man, not someone who reached out emotionally to his colleagues as much as he and they would have liked. I think our relationship allowed him to know others in ways he had not, and once he got used to the idea, he liked it. “There is a loving of you that seems to ooze out to others,” he wrote to me early in his thawing. “Putting my arm around a scientist in my laboratory yesterday—it was a natural unnatural act. [Maybe] it is just latent, having been there all along, waiting for the right stimulus to set it free.” Although his first moves into a more emotional world were tentative—as he put it, “I find reaching out begins to dissipate with time and I start to revert to my regular tendencies of coolness”—he found that experiencing life more intensely was reward in its own right and that life could be found outside of a laboratory.
When it came down to it, Richard and I simply enjoyed being together. We had a number of close friends in whose company we delighted, and we went out several nights a week for pleasure or work or both. We both loved Washington, were hooked on politics, and when in a new city, headed instinctively to its zoo or its natural history and science museums. We were addicted to ALF, a television program about a small, furry, eight-stomached, orange alien from the Lower East Side of the planet Melmac who had crash-landed into the garage of a suburban middle-class family. We watched ALF avidly—to the detriment of work and showing up at Washington dinner parties—and were distressed when the series ended and ALF, captured by the American military, was unable to return to his home planet. So we spun away our hours coming up with alternative fates for him—medical school at Harvard (one of our colleagues there was legendary for conducting group therapy sessions with patients who believed they had been abducted by aliens), work as a war correspondent, a job as a translator at the United Nations—and drew up elaborate plans for his adopted family and his fellow Melmacians. Richard sketched out a complex new planet and galaxy for ALF, to which we added stars and constellations and cats, ALF’s favorite food. Presumably we had more constructive things to be doing with our time, but it didn’t matter. We laughed and drew and conjured, as though there were no end to time. Years later we were still adding mountain ranges and islands and inland seas and delectable new species of cats to ALF’s planet.
Life was fun together. I remember a spring day in Los Angeles that began with dire wolves and ended with me on my hands and knees between the sheets of our bed, picking my way through a thicket of green and pink plastic “grass,” hunting for jelly beans and yellow marsh-mallow chickens. Richard had transformed the bed into a “living Easter basket,” which was filled not only with plastic grass and jelly beans but with all sizes and varieties of chocolate Easter eggs and rabbits as well.
It was a wonderful day, in the way that so many of our days were. We started at the La Brea Tar Pits, which for forty thousand years had trapped and preserved saber-toothed tigers, dire wolves, and ground sloths. Four hundred or so of the dire wolf skulls were mounted on a wall of the museum built at the tar pits. Richard quickly drifted in their direction. He spent well over an hour captivated by the collection of skulls, calling me over to point out small differences in structure from wolf to wolf. I soon got bored—after the first three, the dire wolf skulls looked very much alike to me—and made my way over to the giant ground sloth. We were as happy as two people can be—in the presence of each other, but alone with our imaginings—and eager to share our mullings over lunch.
We had dinner that evening at a restaurant overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and Richard, after a glass of wine, took out two pieces of paper. “Write down the first thing that comes to your mind,” he said. This sounded suspiciously like something a psychiatrist might say, and although he was one, it was the kind of free-association blather that was scarcely like him. He persevered, however, as he was wont to do once his mind was engaged in a new idea or plan. He handed me one of the pieces of paper. On the top, he had scrawled, “Richard.” Under this he had put three categories, “Month of the Year,” “Fish,” and “Tree,” each with a line drawn next to it.
“Write down what you think of when you think of me, and I’ll do the same for you,” he said. We started in on the list; once Richard had set out a game, it was futile to resist. We worked on our answers through another glass of wine and then looked up to compare notes.
“What month am I?” he asked.
“Early May,” I said. “And me?”
“September,” he replied unequivocally. “You are very September.”
A little bit of wine went a long way with Richard. We carried on.
“What kind of fish am I?” he asked.
“A rainbow trout,” I said.
He nodded in approval.
“And me?” I asked. I imagined an exotic reef fish, or a salmon fighting its way upstream.
“An anchovy,” he said with a smirk.
“I hate anchovies,” I replied. He knew this.
“Yes, but I love them.” He smiled sweetly.
“It’s not fair. I made you a rainbow trout.”
He laughed and said, “But I am a rainbow trout.”
And he was, of course.
Deciding on a tree was easy. He was a weeping cherry: graceful and gentle, complexly branched. I was an aspen, he said: tall, resilient, and “seasonally ablaze.”
It all made great sense at the time, in the context of dinner and wine and laughter. And I think still, when I can think of it, that Richard was early May, a rainbow trout, and a weeping cherry.