Lover’s Leap: Author’s Epilogue

After I graduated Boston College Law School in 1971, I worked in a courthouse in my home state of New Jersey. During that year, I became engaged to Paul and planned to return to Massachusetts to get married the next summer. We didn’t believe in diamond rings or formal weddings and kept our plans low key, unpublicized.

Unbeknownst to me, the young, legally blind prosecutor assigned to the courtroom developed romantic feelings for me. Just before I was set to complete my one year judicial clerkship, he invited me out for dinner at a beautiful restaurant in New York City and that very evening asked me to marry him, not knowing that I was already taken. I will never forget the heartbreaking evening of his confession of love and my refusal.

The factual truth ends there.

Last year, I briefly answered a question on a writer’s website, something like “Did you ever turn down a marriage proposal?” I couldn’t erase the memory of that pivotal year in my twenties, a coming of age experience in which forks in the road presented themselves in my career and personal life. At first I recreated the basic elements of that time—living with my parents, the daily courtroom routine, the restaurant scene, even a cameo for my very real cat Columbus.

As I began to write in more detail about the surprising events of that year, intended as a chapter for a future memoir, I felt something more roiling under the surface. I needed a means to access it. I tried giving myself and the prosecutor new names—coincidentally, Nadine is my middle name—and I renamed the prosecutor Anthony.

By simply changing the names of the principals, they became characters with lives of their own and stories to tell, maybe inspired by but no longer tethered to my own history and memory.

The hours upon hours of writing took me back into another place and time, Newark in the 1970s, where these two young lawyers met and connected. Sometimes the depressing sense of being there (characterized by race riots, crime, poverty, pollution from manufacturing) overtook me and I had to take a break. News of the current lead pipe water crisis in Newark kept the dark cloud overhead.

Before I resumed, I decided to change the story itself, because who wants to hear a sad story about a couple in the same workplace, in a miserable city, who didn’t get engaged? Those of you who have read Lover’s Leap know that Nadine impetuously accepted Anthony’s proposal, unleashing a series of events that takes these characters to parts unknown, beyond my own life, and into theirs.

As I moved them forward—what do they say, what do they feel, what do they do—I lived in the reality of Nadine and Anthony, the star-crossed lovers. I followed the lead of my characters into the parallel universe that I had unlocked. I created a family for him. I envisioned a courtship. Things began to happen beyond the proposal, at first very good, then not so much. And finally, a look-back—by one of them, anyway.

I exercised the freedom to build them to my creative specifications along the way, making Nadine beautiful in her navy blue dress walking in New York City, making Anthony handsome by dressing him in his charcoal gray suit and revealing him behind his eyeglasses, and finally, agonizing over the ending until I determined their fate and left them to their future.

There were times I had to make an effort to force myself back to real life after finishing up my writing for the day. Their world was vivid and seductive, hard to leave—a mixture of youth and fresh desire, mixed signals and life-changing decisions, both strong and fragile emotions struggling to survive a hazardous journey.

After all, this is a love story, and I—excuse me, Nadine—got to be in it.

Finally, after many months, I separated from Nadine and Anthony and left them on the page for good. Some of my own life experience and emotional truths remain embedded in their story. Same as my middle name, always a part of me, even if not known to many others and rarely used in my signature.

I posted Lover’s Leap on my blog in three parts, with the editorial guidance of my team of fellow authors and supporters, David Bookbinder, Sandie Horwitz, and Sue Hand. If you care to read my first try at fiction and are curious about Anthony and Nadine, please check it out in the three preceding posts.