He was very successful.
I couldn’t figure out what he saw in me. Or really, why he would even be interested, but he was, and when he turned on that dimpled smile it was very difficult for 20-year-old me to resist. And so began a courtship that introduced me to a world I had only read about. Dinners at Chicago's high-end restaurants where he and our companions would seriously debate the superiority of Piper-Heidsieck over Dom Pérignon Champagne, and insist on ordering a bottle of each to decide. We spent many evenings at the Chicago Yacht Club after days on the lake aboard private yachts.
His charm and humor was legend, and he was in constant demand at dinner parties and sailing trips. As his girlfriend, I usually joined him. He treated me like a queen. In public.
In private, he used humor as a weapon to belittle my appearance, my attire, my abilities, and my intelligence. Since we worked together, he knew what I was working on and who I was working with. Which is probably why I missed some of the clues that were present early in our relationship. Well, that, and the fact that no one talked about intimate partner violence back in the early 1970s. They just did it, or suffered it silently.
We had been seeing each other for three years when he transferred to the West Coast. He began dating other people. So did I. It was during his visit to Chicago in December 1972 that he tried to kill me.