Where I'm Calling From

kept going around, and we somehow got on the subject of love. Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He said he’d spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years in his life.
    Terri said the man she lived with before she lived with Mel loved her so much he tried to kill her. Then Terri said, “He beat me up one night. He dragged me around the living room by my ankles. He kept saying, ‘I love you, I love you, you bitch.’ He went on dragging me around the living room. My head kept knocking on things.” Terri looked around the table. “What do you do with love like that?”
    She was a bone-thin woman with a pretty face, dark eyes, and brown hair that hung down her back. She liked necklaces made of turquoise, and long pendant earrings.
    “My God, don’t be silly. That’s not love, and you know it,” Mel said. “I don’t know what you’d call it, but I sure know you wouldn’t call it love.”
    “Say what you want to, but I know it was,” Terri said. “It may sound crazy to you, but it’s true just the same. People are different, Mel. Sure, sometimes he may have acted crazy. Okay. But he loved me. In his own way maybe, but he loved me.
    There was love there, Mel. Don’t say there wasn’t.”
    Mel let out his breath. He held his glass and turned to Laura and me. “The man threatened to kill me,”
    Mel said. He finished his drink and reached for the gin bottle. “Terri’s a romantic. Terri’s of the kick-meso-I’ll-know-you-love-me school. Terri, hon, don’t look that way.” Mel reached across the table and touched Terri’s cheek with his fingers. He grinned at her.
    “Now he wants to make up,” Terri said.
    “Make up what?” Mel said. “What is there to make up? I know what I know. That’s all.”
    “How’d we get started on this subject, anyway?” Terri said. She raised her glass and drank from it. “Mel always has love on his mind,” she said. “Don’t you, honey?” She smiled, and I thought that was the last of it.
    “I just wouldn’t call Ed’s behavior love. That’s all I’m saying, honey,” Mel said. “What about you guys?”
    Mel said to Laura and me. “Does that sound like love to you?”
    “I’m the wrong person to ask,” I said. “I didn’t even know the man. I’ve only heard his name mentioned in passing. I wouldn’t know. You’d have to know the particulars. But I think what you’re saying is that love is an absolute.”
    Mel said, “The kind of love I’m talking about is. The kind of love I’m talking about, you don’t try to kill people.”
    Laura said, “I don’t know anything about Ed, or anything about the situation. But who can judge anyone else’s situation?”
    I touched the back of Laura’s hand. She gave me a quick smile. I picked up Laura’s hand. It was warm, the nails polished, perfectly manicured. I encircled the broad wrist with my fingers, and I held her.
    When I left, he drank rat poison,”
    Terri said. She clasped her arms with her hands. “They took him to the hospital in Santa Fe. That’s where we lived then, about ten miles out. They saved his life. But his gums went crazy from it. I mean they pulled away from his teeth. After that, his teeth stood out like fangs. My God,” Terri said. She waited a minute, then let go of her arms and picked up her glass. “What people won’t do!” Laura said.
    “He’s out of the action now,” Mel said. “He’s dead.”
    Mel handed me the saucer of limes. I took a section, squeezed it over my drink, and stirred the ice cubes with my finger.
    “It gets worse,” Terri said. “He shot himself in the mouth. But he bungled that too. Poor Ed,” she said.
    Terri shook her head.
    “Poor Ed nothing,” Mel said. “He was dangerous.”
    Mel was forty-five years old. He was tall and rangy with curly soft hair. His face and arms were brown from the tennis he played. When he was sober, his gestures, all his movements, were precise, very careful.
    “He did love me though, Mel. Grant me that,” Terri said. “That’s all I’m asking. He didn’t love me the way you love me. I’m not saying that. But he loved me. You can grant me that, can’t you?”
    “What do you mean, he bungled it?” I said.
    Laura leaned forward with her glass. She put her elbows on the table and held her glass in both hands.
    She glanced from Mel to Terri and waited with a