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sight” concept. “You can be immediately attracted to someone sexually, but love requires an investment and a risk,” he said. “Once you confess it, you’re out there hanging, hoping you have not misjudged the person you hope loves you, too.”
    I knew he was more religious than I was, but he was never obsessive about it when he was with me. I think it was simply part of his faith to believe that whatever he believed, eventually I would, too, and to the same extent and intensity. We had disagreements about it, but he was always tolerant during those early days.
    Of course, my parents just loved that he was a religious man, even though they weren’t very religious. They went to church on holidays and for funerals and weddings, but in my father’s mind, giving up his golf on a Sunday was more of a cardinal sin. John made no argument. He was about as accepting a man as I could ever imagine. I know that was because of his confidence that what he believed was right. He didn’t have to convince anyone.
    “I’d be just as comfortable in a room full of atheists,” he once said. “No matter what they profess, they live in doubt. I don’t.”
    In a social world where young men were increasingly superficial and openly arrogant, John Clark was a dream come true. I could see the envy in the eyes of my girlfriends whenever they saw us together. Every one of them surely asked herself what I had that she didn’t, why I had found a man like John and she couldn’t. When I complained about this once to John and told him how I couldn’t stand the jealousy I saw in my so-called good friends, he thought a moment and said, “The only people who really feel happy for you are people who already have what they want, people who are comfortable being who they are. Seek those out to be your close friends. Acquaintances are fine, but think of them as just what they are—temporary, disposable imitations of real friends and pools of green envy.”
    How could I not fall in love with John Clark and want to spend my life with such a man, a man who could give away wisdom as easily as one of those people hired to stand on street corners could hand out advertisements?
    Before we were married, John had already gone after the Tudor house we would own. He loved the cul-de-sac, the clean, quiet neighborhood. The first time he showed it to me, I did think it looked like an illustration torn out of a children’s fable, with its white picket fence, immaculate front walk, hedges, and bright green lawn. No one had a great deal of acreage in Brentwood, but the house had a good-sized lot with a row of lemon, orange, and grapefruit trees in the backyard. It was easy to imagine us as a family there, our children laughing and squealing with a feeling of complete security. There would be no drive-by shootings, no inner-city terrors. Fences were designed more for appearance than for safety. It would always be safe to walk at night.
    John knew the real estate agent handling it, and he knew just how to bargain for it, because the owner was in some distress. The day after we bought it, its value was already up twenty percent. Anyone hearing all of this wouldn’t have to wonder why I thought that every day, every month, every year of John’s and my life together would be filled with success and perfection.
    Of course, it wasn’t that way. It isn’t that way for anyone. Lately, I was having more and more trouble navigating the sea of perfection on which John had placed our marriage. Ironically, it was his mother who had suggested my therapist. She had a good friend whose daughter used him. She relented with, “If you young people today need such things, at least you can seek the best.”
    The pills he prescribed were meant to bring me to an even keel so our sessions could be therapeutically successful. I had kept this from Lieutenant Abraham because I feared that he would think this was all my fault, that my psychological and emotional problems were the