Last year, right after her daughter passed away, Ms. Gesterling came over to our house for coffee. It was strange to see my old math teacher - the one so many kids had chortled about, convinced she was a horseback-riding lesbian - sitting at my breakfast table. The memory of her story, which started out about the funeral but ended up an account of how her daughter fell down dead in the halls of her own high school, is one I can't dwell on. Back then, very few things made me cry, but the things that did managed to do so every time (the choice paragraph from Sophie's Choice, for example). So with that afternoon, a story I've never spoken aloud but which I mentioned in this space.

I was eating lunch alone at the counter today, reading Empire Falls. (I wonder, now, if in years past I ever read books to avoid looking like I was eating by myself...at any rate, these days, it's a choice I don't regret) I didn't notice the man in the all-cream suit until he leaned over and asked, "Do you know how much tuition costs at GW?" I stuttered. I wondered if it was a pick up, but he must have been at least 55.

"Probably about 40,000 a year," I said, although I honestly had no idea. Partly I wanted him to stop talking, partly I was curious. So I kept my book propped open with a finger and paid lazy attention.

"See, my son, he's looking into college here." The man shifted, smiled, looked away and back again. "My wife, you know, she likes this area. She - " he paused. "You know, actually, she passed away in April. She had cancer, it was very unexpected." He paused, not for tears, for thought. I waited for the rest of the story.

Which, once it started, was actually about his family, not about GW’s tuition rates. He’d moved from [Iran] as a boy, intent on studying in the United States. He’d met his wife in college – she was “my best friend, my partner in life, my sweetheart, everything” (it’s strange how some people can say things like this without making me cringe, but maybe I cut him slack because, after all, the lady in question was dead) and they’d had both a Christian and an Islamic wedding. The family moved from [California] so he could work for [a government group]. They had two sons, one of whom was in the [Navy], the other of whom had just been arrested. “He’s in jail, he killed someone, believe it or not, I’m ashamed to say it.” The killing took place just two months before his wife died. The man and his wife had purchased a huge new house, their dream house, “she was going to decorate it, everything” and their younger son had brought his pregnant mistress to the place when no one else was there. (The man says the family knew nothing about the mistress, since the son was married) The son and the mistress fought about the baby, next thing anyone knew, the woman was dead at the bottom of the stairs.

“It was an accident. He’s not a murderer, for God’s sake,” said the man, tucking photos of his wife and kids back into his wallet after showing them to me. The man’s organization paid for the son’s lawyers, but the man himself had trouble. “When I told my wife, I couldn’t not tell her even though I didn’t know how, I’d never seen her yell like that.” He said, sadly enough, that he partly blamed his son for his wife’s demise. When he returned to the house without her for the first time, he “collapsed – I woke up [15] hours later and the doctors thought I might die. They still don’t know what it was.”

He said his colleagues didn’t understand how bad it was – many of them were also [Iranian] and didn’t “understand how marriage is in this country, an equal partnership.” They advised him to marry again. “But,” he reflected, “it wouldn’t be fair to the woman.”

At the end of the conversation, wherein he just talked and I listened, I went back to my desk but had trouble concentrating. I don’t know how much of this story is true, although I changed the identifying details just in case, but I realized that I was momentarily cured of my own misery.

Recently, I have been having some issues with an individual. He was born fifty years ago in a reactionary country where women had few rights, and he’s spent most of his life abusing his wife and kids. Also, the past three books I’ve read all feature wife-beaters in prominent roles (Empire Falls, A Thousand Splendid Suns, the Virgin Blue). Imagine how surprised I was to find that a man born in a reactionary country can get a scholarship to the United States, marry a woman of a different faith, and genuinely mourn her unexpected death. Maybe this happens all the time. Maybe he made her miserable while she was alive. I don’t know. I’m just saying that maybe some people do love each other. Maybe it can happen, without being twisted.