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By Root 484 0

and make plans to move to Washington. The whole thing had been a short but very convincing courtship. I loved being with him and found him not just unbelievably smart, but imaginative, fiendishly curious, refreshingly open-minded, and wonderfully easygoing. Even then, very early in our relationship, I could not imagine my life without him. I resigned my tenured position at the medical school with genuine regret at leaving the University of California, which I loved, and considerable anxiety about the financial implications of giving up a secure income, and then went to a long round of farewell parties given by colleagues, friends, and students. Overall, however, I left Los Angeles with few regrets. It had never been the City of Angels to me, and I was more than happy to leave it, first, thousands of feet below me—and then, finally, thousands of miles behind—filled with near death, a completely shattered innocence, and a recurrently lost and broken mind. Life in California had been often good, even very wonderful, but it was hard for me to see any of that at the time I returned to Washington to live. The ever promising, always elusive, and infinitely complex Promised Land seemed to me to be exactly that: promised.

Richard and I moved into a house in Georgetown and quickly confirmed what our common sense should have told us: we could not have been more different. He was low-key, I was intense; things that cut me to the quick he was able to sail by with scarcely a notice; he was slow to anger, I quick; the world registered gently upon him, sometimes not at all, whereas I was fast to feel both pleasure and pain. He was, indeed, in most ways and at most times, a man of moderation; I was quicker to slight, quicker to sense, and perhaps quicker to reach out and attempt to heal hurts we inevitably caused one another. Concerts and opera, mainstays of my existence, were torture to him, as were long, extended talks or vacations lasting more than three days. We were a complete mismatch. I was filled with a thousand enthusiasms or black despair; Richard, who for the most part maintained an even emotional course, found it difficult to handle—or, worse yet, take seriously—my intensely mercurial moods. He had no idea what to do with me. If I asked him what he was thinking, it was never about death, the human condition, relationships, or us; it was, instead, almost always about a scientific problem or, occasionally, about a patient. He pursued his science and the practice of medicine with the same romantic intensity that was integral to the way I pursued the rest of life.

He was not, it was clear, going to gaze meaningfully into my eyes over long dinners and fine wines, nor discuss literature and music over late-night coffee and port. He, in fact, couldn’t sit still very long, had a scarcely measurable attention span, didn’t drink much, never touched coffee, and wasn’t particularly interested in the complexities of relationships or the affirmations of art. He couldn’t abide poetry and was genuinely amazed that I seemed to spend so much of my day just wandering around, rather aimlessly, going to the zoo, visiting art galleries, walking my dog—a sweet, wholly independent, morbidly shy basset hound named Pumpkin—or meeting friends for lunch and breakfast. Yet not once in the years we have been together have I doubted Richard’s love for me, nor mine for him. Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe. Our common intellectual interests—medicine, science, and psychiatry—are very strong ones, and our differences in both substance and style have allowed each of us a great deal of independence, which has been essential and which, ultimately, has bound us very close to one another over the years. My life with Richard has become a safe harbor: an extremely interesting place, filled with love and warmth and always a bit open to the outer sea. But like all safe harbors that manage to retain fascination as well as safety, it was less than smooth sailing to reach.

When I first told Richard about my manic-depressive