Winter 1980, Pitfalls of a Checklist Bride

We arrived back in the Bay a week after class had begun, with Coop still clearly shaken by the John Lennon murder several weeks before, and increasingly confused as to the path forward. Professor Luxemburg’s firm had an opening and was moving on from the Black Panther litigation and becoming involved in toxic exposure cases, mainly asbestos exposure from east Bay shipyard workers, which interested Coop, but it was becoming somewhat obvious to both of us that Coop had no passion and likely little aptitude for the law. 

Before he would need to cross that Rubicon he still had a couple of classes left to meet graduation requirements, one of which, Evidence, met at 9 am on Friday mornings. Any other day of the week the time slot would have nixed the class, but there were two extenuating factors that ultimately determined Coop’s fate. 

First, the class was being taught by Professor Thelton Henderson, a colleague of Dr. King, who as the first African American attorney for the Civil Rights Division of the US Dept of Justice had investigated the Birmingham Church bombings. Second, since the first week of law school Coop and friends had played basketball from 7 to 8:30 am on Fridays at the Mission Street YMCA, a Friday morning class was actually perfect. Fate can have an interesting lineage!

Entering class in its second week, Coop joined his basketball mates in the back file of the small classroom. In the first row was a woman who Coop had not previously noticed, a second year dubbed by his horn dog friends as “the ice queen.” She was as darkly beautiful as she was inscrutable. She always entered early, took the same seat and dutifully scribbled notes. She never spoke except when directly questioned by Professor Henderson. She was always prepared and answered the most complex question correctly with minimal words or affect. 

Several of Coop’s buddies had attempted to engage her in conversation, only to be politely and emphatically shot down. There was fifty dollars on the table for anyone who could get so much as a phone number or cup of coffee. Coop, never one to walk away from a challenge (or fifty bucks), having studiously avoided even going on a date with the hostile “womyn” in his class, decided to dive right in. What did he have to lose? Well, more than he could imagine - but as it turned out that would take at least ten years, one child, and a busted marriage for the cost to be fully realized.

After class the next week, Coop was able to tail her outside. Somewhat naively he thought that having a large white drooling dog with him in class might have brought him to her attention. He was wrong! He said hello, and quickly ran through his rehearsed opening. “I have three questions: what’s your name, have you read any good books or seen any good movies lately, and will you go out with me?”

She did not even blink, and with no emotion or indication she found any humor in the approach, she responded, “Technically, that was four questions. The answers in order: Sarah, yes, yes, and no.” And why is that mangy mutt growling at me?

Coop was somewhat taken aback by the quickness of the response and the seeming rejection, but figured, what the hell? He quickly explained the bet, the juvenile hyenas in the back, and the dollars at stake. She seemed to take this all in for a moment, looked down demurely, shifted from foot to foot in her peasant skirt and Birkenstocks, and then responded, “Yes, I will join you for a cup of coffee, but with a codicil. We split the fifty bucks. Also, leave the ill-tempered canine at home.” Of such a tawdry deal are future children made. 

They had coffee the next day at the coffee-shop abutting the law school, so that the event could be verified. Coop decided that the “ice queen” moniker was undeserved, that she was just shy and tired of unwanted male attention, and had adopted the outwardly hostile persona to be left alone. She was Jewish, a Phi Beta Kappa Berkeley grad, and widely traveled, having recently completed a trip from Paris to Tel Aviv overland, alone. 

Coop was smitten. She came home with him after the second date, and if slightly demure, was a fairly uninhibited lover. There was one clue that Coop ignored that first night - after all, he was going to get laid - when he first brought her into his Lake Merritt studio. I, a good judge of human character, ran behind the bathroom door, growled menacingly, and refused to come out. This was my version of “Danger, Will Robinson!” 

There was something about this woman that was slightly off, but when Coop asked me the next morning to explain myself, I could not put my finger on it. She fit Coop’s checklist: smart, check; pretty, check; well-traveled, check; well read, check. With all that, she worried me. There was something disquieting about her. A certain angst seemed to follow her around like a sad puppy seeking a home.

Unfortunately, Coop, like many other well intentioned male humans suffered from “rescuers syndrome,” particularly when related to a pretty maiden in need. Whether empathy, or some deep wound inflicted by a mother who could be rather unmotherly, damsels in distress would always have an appeal, much to Coop’s future detriment!

But that was for the future, and sadly, not Coop’s last lapse in judgement when it came to what was once called the “fairer sex.” Truth be told, my boy would be well into his 50’s before he overcame his inability to distinguish naked desire from a good partner/companion.

The initial months of their relationship was exciting as those things tend to be. A three day camping trip in beautiful Mendocino County on the north coast followed by day trips to Tahoe and Yosemite Park. Live music at the numerous blues clubs in San Francisco and a weekend in Death Valley. A relationship could not have gotten off to a more promising start. As Coop described it, they shared similar tastes in music and food, as well as a general revulsion at the so-called Reagan revolution just getting underway, after the genial Bedtime for Bonzo star eviscerated Jimmy Carter in November, sweeping the country and in the process driving from office numerous Democratic liberal stalwarts including Senators George Mcgovern, the Democrats 1972 presidential standard bearer, Frank Church, who had led the investigation of illegal CIA covert operations, and Warren Magnuson, instrumental in passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

When school ended in May, still reflecting the glow of a new relationship, Sarah agreed to join us on a cross country road trip to Florida where Coop would be in the wedding party of a college roommate. Away from school, with pressure building as to both his future direction and whether this relationship was more than an end of school diversion wrapped in lust, we started out from Oakland, choosing a northerly route so as to spend a few days at Coop’s parents cabin in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania, before turning south to Florida. 

While still wary of this recent addition to our lives I’d decided to give her a chance. Was I simply jealous or was there real reason for concern? After all, I was on an important mission and the wrong woman could be a serious problem. The first days were uneventful. We camped in an icy field in Idaho, spent several days at a rustic cabin in Jackson Hole, and then headed out across Wyoming for the South Dakota Badlands. It was here that a wiser man would have realized that Sarah carried some deep scars that needed tending. In the long hours driving across the empty spaces of the inter-mountain west, the two lovers bared their souls….and my initial reticent amber warning signs started flashing red. 

It was becoming abundantly clear that this woman was not a happy soul. Only months before entering law school she’d broken up with a long-time boyfriend over his lack of religious conviction (a subject that she and Coop had barely scratched), even though he’d been willing to convert to Judaism. She had moved to Tel Aviv for graduate school, abruptly quit the program where she was on full scholarship, returned to the states to be with said boyfriend in Kansas City, then just as quickly ended the relationship and moved home to San Diego. Stability was clearly not a strong point. In addition, it was clear she had significant unresolved “daddy issues,” in desperate need of professional intervention. 

At Wall Drug, a kitchy little piece of Americana, just outside the park, Coop picked up a copy of the New York Times. Below the fold on page one was a story of some new atrocity in Israel/Palestine. Which side committed this one is irrelevant to what followed. Parked at an overlook, Coop made, what on the surface appeared to be a rather innocuous comment to the effect it was impossible to sort out who had committed more grievous offenses and the only effective solution would be “two states for two peoples.” What followed should have convinced Coop right there that he needed to take a second look at where this thing was headed. She started screaming. Hurling invective after invective that Coop was a “self-hating” Jew who didn’t understand anything about the middle east and had insufficient pride in his people and their suffering. This rant went on for a full 10 minutes, during which Coop was not given 10 seconds to defend himself. 

Sadly, Coop was too far gone, despite my warnings, to recognize the deeper issues here that would slowly rise to the surface in the ensuing years, proposing a week later in Pennsylvania. After relocating to Atlanta, they didn’t get married for another 2 years during which the glow wore off and her deep rooted unhappiness surfaced in ever varying circumstances. She hated Atlanta, which she repeated incessantly. Everyone she met were either unsophisticated rubes or was antisemitic, a fact she determined through ever more obtuse peregrinations. 

They got married, but even before that event Coop was beginning to have buyers' remorse. He told me the day before the wedding that he realized I was right and that he was likely making a big mistake. However, lots of money had been spent on the grand affair, to take place at a temple in San Diego, and hopefully things would work out.

One positive thing did come out of the wedding. Her Rabbi, in Coop’s pre-wedding meeting, which he had insisted on, as a result of his religious agnosticism layered with existential doubt as to the very existence of a supreme being, taught both of us something that he had somehow missed in his childhood indoctrination into the Torah. That is, that one major distinction between Judaism and both Christianity and Islam, is that under Jewish law, at least as interpreted by revisionist doctrine, faith in God was beside the point. You were to be judged, not on your attendance at temple or profession of faith, but rather on your actions. This was something Coop would latch onto and profess repeatedly as the years rolled forward.

Back in Atlanta, Sarah jumped from job to job, with each one populated by the worst sort of people. It all came to a head at a Christmas party at her latest law firm, a place where she assured Coop, that despite the fact several of the partners were Jewish, many held seriously antisemitic attitudes. 

The party was enlightening, but not in the way she projected. The people were charming. The partners spoke glowingly of her work. A light bulb or more accurately a 4th of July worthy fireworks display exploded in Coop’s head. The problem was not Atlanta, the lawyers she worked with, or our narrow group of “acceptable” friends. The problem was her. From this moment on, the end was inevitable. Several years, a move back to California, three trial separations, numerous marriage counseling sessions, and one child later, the end finally came, an end (in her delusional mind, a betrayal) that would eat at her even 25 years later at their son’s wedding. 

The final verdict was bestowed by a close friend who got to know her after the unhappy couple was back in California, in that far happier time. “You thought she was deep, when in reality she was just depressed.” So much for the checklist bride!