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“At the church,” Paul said with a nostalgic smile. “When I came here to be the minister, it was my first church. I’d been an assistant minister, but I was young and new to the area. I didn’t know anyone or how they did things. The guy who was here before me, he had been the minister for more than twenty years, and everyone loved him. So he was a tough act to follow, and I was really nervous. I had no idea what I was doing. Everyone said, ‘You should talk to Sara.’ ‘Ask Sara.’ She was just the center of everything. So I had to go to her. She convinced me I could do the job and that the people would accept me. Then, well, she became the center of everything for me. And when I married her, it was like I married the whole church.”
“So was that what you loved about her?”
“It was part of it,” Paul said. “The reason everyone loved her was that she was so full of energy and outgoing.” Paul suddenly realized how much Ian and Sara had in common. Outwardly they seemed like completely different people. Sara was straight-laced. Ian was rough around the edges. But they had that same spark of life, the same energy.
“I’m always attracted to extroverts,” Paul told Ian, “outgoing people. I really need someone like that to balance me. I never have any idea what someone like that sees in me, though.”
“She must have thought you were smart and deep,” Ian said. “You probably made her think.”
“Maybe,” Paul said. He gazed at one of the many wall-mounted photos of his wife, seeing it as if for the first time. The image of her smile still filled him with a sense of comfort and peace. “I just fell for her right away. I think the main thing that worked about our marriage was that she understood me. It’s hard to put it any differently than that. She sometimes knew what I was thinking before I thought it. We were completely connected. When she was sick, she was always trying to comfort me.” In spite of his best efforts to control his emotions, Paul felt tears welling in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. “She was the sick one,” he said, “and she was trying to make me feel better. That’s the kind of person she was.”
“That must have been hard,” Ian said.
“It was hard.” Paul wiped away a tear. “We had so many plans together. That’s the worst part. She was only thirty-four. We wanted to have kids, but we put it off, and then she got sick. I still miss her. I miss talking to her.”
“You’re lucky, though, that you had that,” Ian said. “That’s real love. I wish I had something like that…. I wish I could meet someone like you.”
Paul snapped back to the present. “Like me?”
“Yeah. Someone devoted like that. Someone really there for you. Who knows me better than anybody. Deep, connected.”
“Well, you already know someone exactly like me.”
“I know but, I meant…. Wait, what do you mean?”
“Nothing. I just mean… I didn’t mean anything.”
“Are you sure?”
“You’ve really never been in love?”
There was a pause as Ian decided whether to allow Paul’s abrupt change of subject. “Not really,” he finally said. “I thought I was once, but it wasn’t, really.”
“What happened?”
Ian seemed reluctant to talk about it. “He cheated on me,” he said. “A lot. He acted
like it was my fault. He said I was… ‘needy’ was the word he used. ‘You’re pretty, but you’re too needy for me’.” (Paul was finally getting comfortable with the pronoun “he” when Ian talked about love.)
“You don’t seem needy to me,” Paul said.
“And you would know,” Ian said with a laugh, “because you bailed me out of jail and put me into rehab.”
“Exactly.”
“Then there was the guy, my first ‘love’. You know, the first one I slept with. I thought I was in love with him too. He was older.”
“How much older?”
“Not a lot older. Like five years, but I was only sixteen.”
“He was twenty-one years old?”
“Let me check your math, sixteen plus five… yeah, that’s right.”
“What kind of twenty-one-year-old sleeps with a high-school kid?”
“A selfish one, I guess. Someone who wanted to be adored. He was a dancer. Really sexy.”
