She was fifteen years younger than Herb, had suffered periods of anorexia, and during the late sixties, before she’d gone to nursing school, had been a dropout, a “street person,” as she put it. She liked necklaces made of turquoise, and long pendant earrings. She was a bone-thin woman with a pretty face, dark eyes, and brown hair that hung down her back. “What do you do with love like that?” she said. He dragged me around the living room by my ankles, all the while saying, ‘I love you, don’t you see? I love you, you bitch.’ He went on dragging me around the living room, my head knocking on things.” She looked around the table at us and then looked at her hands on her glass. Then she said, “He beat me up one night, the last night we lived together. Terri said the man she lived with before she lived with Herb loved her so much he tried to kill her.
He’d left the Church at the same time, but he said he still looked back to those years in the seminary as the most important in his life. When he was young he’d spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. Herb thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. The gin and the tonic water kept going around, and we somehow got on the subject of love. We lived in Albuquerque, but we were all from somewhere else. There were Herb and I and his second wife, Teresa-Terri, we called her-and my wife, Laura.
Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink. The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin.
My friend Herb McGinnis, a cardiologist, was talking.
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