Risk Game by Francis J. Greenburger

Author:Francis J. Greenburger
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781942952527
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2017-01-25T18:30:22.951375+00:00

Chapter 8

THE PAIN OF BLACK MONDAY AND THE JOY OF A BABY BOY

I was never all that comfortable with marriage. I found that the pressure to make a romance legal intensified with women when the relationship began to have problems, and my position was that if the relationship wasn’t working, marriage wasn’t going to help. Marriage should be a celebration, I reasoned, not a solution.

Karen, a beautiful Australian lawyer, was the first woman who, if not leading me to reconsider my aversion to the formal institution, at least got me thinking about settling into a more stable union that included children.

I noticed her immediately—a red flower in her long, dark hair—when she walked into one of my favorite restaurants, Gotham, in the winter of 1984. She sat down by herself, which was a little unusual on a Saturday night, so I sent her a drink and soon she had joined me and my friends at dinner. As it turned out, Karen had only arrived that very day in New York to start work at a large law firm.

Karen was still on my mind the following morning as I finished up last-minute business before leaving on my Christmas holiday in St. Bart’s the next day. Until then I had been eagerly anticipating the trip; but now I wanted to see Karen again. I had an idea that seemed a little forward, even for me, and before I had a chance to contemplate its weirdness, I was calling her.

“Do you want to go away with me to the Caribbean for ten days? I’m leaving tomorrow,” I said. The request was a little unusual for a girl I’d only met the night before, but I figured, what the hell? She asked for ten minutes to think about it, which was fair enough, and then called back to say yes.

When we were on the plane to St. Bart’s, I said, while really happy she decided to join me, I was sort of surprised since she didn’t know the first thing about me. “As it turns out, I’m a good guy,” I said. “But God knows, I could have been Dracula or something.”

“Most people make decisions by thinking about why not to do something,” she said. “They worry about all the bad things that could happen. I try to think about what good could happen.”

I was in love.

For several months, we spent most of our time together, and we got as far as discussing the idea of having a child. But one day Karen announced that her previous boyfriend of seven years she had left back home was coming to see her, and she needed a week to decide how she felt about him. At the end of that very long week, she made up her mind that I was the one she wanted. The fairy-tale ending wasn’t to be, however, because not long after, Karen hooked up with someone from her firm at the office Christmas party and we broke up.

I had grown very attached to Karen and was heartbroken.

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