L.A. Affairs: I confessed I wanted babies soon after our first date. Would he stick around?
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When Mark told me on our first date that he co-owned a mortgage bank with his father, Wes, who had been to federal prison for fraud, I should have run away. After all, I’m a career prosecutor. I read rap sheets to dissect a person’s past and predict future behavior.
Mark, 30, was eight years my junior. He was handsome and polite, with an endearing Oklahoma twang. But my time to procreate was running out. Sitting in Il Farro over focaccia, with his vest over a T-shirt, he looked even more boyish.
Remarkably, he trusted his father. When investigators had closed in, Wes fled to his yacht in France. After extradition, he squandered his children’s trust funds and was convicted. After widespread publicity, Mark’s siblings chose to drop their father’s surname, but I noticed that Mark kept it.
Before he left, my ex told me I was bad in the kitchen and in the bedroom. Would I find my passion again after a night at a strip club?
I admired his loyalty, but after the first date, possibly in a bid to repel him with honesty, I said I needed to have babies soon.
When he called again, I said, “Did you hear me about babies? Anyway, I’m heading to an ashram to meditate.” That should’ve turned him off! But on my way home after landing at Los Angeles International Airport, I heard the voicemail he’d left asking to see me.
Our differences multiplied. Mark was from the Bible Belt; my parents were Holocaust survivors. I dreamed of preparing sea urchins with a “sous chef” boyfriend; he didn’t cook, and his palate was from the kids menu. I fantasized about backpacking the world; a jaunt to Vegas satisfied his wanderlust. He didn’t read; I wanted to be a writer. He had two plasma screens blasting sports. My 13-inch TV was my nightlight.
Previously, I’d been easily seduced by demonstrative courtship, but he was not effusive. When someone burst into laughter with “She’s hysterical!” at my joke, Mark looked bewildered.
He was also painfully quiet. “My parents took me to a shrink to figure out why I didn’t talk.” Meanwhile, I filled noiseless spaces with nervous chatter.
Eventually, I met Wes, a slight man in too-large 1970s glasses, driving an ugly green pickup. I was surprised to find him so naturally charming and gentle. By this point in my legal career, I had seen my share of criminals and couldn’t picture Wes in an orange jumpsuit.
My ex ended things with me and started dating someone new — someone I knew from CrossFit. So why did I feel like I was competing with her?
After Mark and I made love, I noticed how his quiet side also meant he didn’t fill space with nervous energy, getting up to shower or checking his phone. He just was there with me, a parallel presence I’d never felt before. As I drifted to sleep, he said “I love you” so inaudibly, maybe I imagined it.
Still, as we say at work, the jury was out. But unlike most attorneys, Mark didn’t talk to hear himself, and his lack of ego intrigued me.
On a trip to Hawaii eight months in, I waited for the ring to come out over every mai tai at sunset. Didn’t I warn him I didn’t have time to waste?
At 11 months, we visited my old-fashioned parents. To them, bringing a man home was serious. At dinner, my dad prodded Mark in his heavy Polish accent. What were Mark’s intentions? Mark sat mute. I was furious. I thought about how Mark would not take his stepfather’s name, how no one could ever make him do anything he didn’t want — a stubborn mule. I was wasting time.
The next month at a local osteria, I sat sipping scarlet Brunello by candlelight; Mark looked at his menu, not me.
“Hey,” I said. “I love you, but we’re on different pages.”
Mark rolled his eyes. “Do we have to have this conversation right now?” When I persisted, like a good prosecutor would, he tossed a ring box onto the table. Between us, we’d ruined his proposal.
There were more warning signs: The week of our wedding, I lost my voice. The day before our wedding, in my parents’ home, we had a massive flood. On our wedding day, it poured, forcing us all inside. After the ceremony, as we drove in the deluge to a celebration, we crashed into the car in front of us.
And on our honeymoon in Italy, we drove through Tuscany and again had another rear-ender. More portents, I was sure.
But our marriage was not filled with disasters, and there were breaks in the clouds that evinced Mark’s unwavering endurance and depth. Shortly after the wedding, with no heartbeat in one pregnancy, Mark held me when I cried. With the welcome sound of a heartbeat in another pregnancy, he cried.
I wanted Midwestern prairies, but we moved to his hometown on the West Coast. He wooed me and wanted L.A. to seduce me. Would it really happen?
When I was flattened by postpartum depression and had a terrifying health misdiagnosis, Mark was there; the aligned presence was now more like a pillar holding me upright. Love became less about words, and more about the choice to stay.
Mark’s dad, meanwhile, was at the births of our children. He brought saltines and Gatorade when we had the stomach flu, and he helped us install a washer on a weekend. At Sunday dinners, he spoke of loyalty, tearing up about his devoted son who visited him in prison. I loved Wes.
Thirteen years had passed since my first date with Mark, and that’s when that initial red flag reared its ugly head. Over a verbal disagreement about investments, Wes punched Mark, and Mark left their business, never to speak to his dad again. Not long after, Wes took money from an innocent victim.
We found ourselves in financial trouble untangling Wes’ debts. I’d taken 10 years away from my work to raise our kids, but I begged my way back into the district attorney’s office. When everything is stripped away, you see who someone is. I saw how Mark was a survivor. This was an impulse I knew from my parents.
Mark scraped together our savings and bought a new business. In the first weeks at my new position in the county courtroom, I saw Wes’ name on my calendar; he’d been arrested. Humiliatingly, I had to tell my new boss I couldn’t appear on the case.
When I saw the flames and smoke of the fires on the screen from thousands of miles away, it felt as though I had lost Eric all over again.
As I look back on our 25 years of marriage, I see a relationship filled with warnings but profoundly offset by Mark’s highest value: loyalty. I had seen Mark’s fierce devotion to family, that he could make hard decisions like keeping his name and that he was resilient.
I used to think you could figure out compatibility from a distance and foresee how things would turn out, just as I look at a criminal history to judge whether someone will reoffend. But people surprise you. Why a relationship works is a mystery.
And the two car accidents? They did turn out to be omens. Mark now owns a driving school.
The author is working on a memoir, “Misjudged,” about the unlikely friendship she forged with a former gang member she prosecuted who was sentenced to life in prison. She’s on Instagram: @karenmckinneywriter
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
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