“I’m sorry, but I just don’t like your laugh.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve tried to get over this, but it irritates me. It sounds phony.”

“Phony? How can you say that?! If I were putting it on, don’t you think I’d make it more attractive? Geez: whenever I really get going I make no sound. I run the risk of snorting when I finally take a breath.”

“I know, I know. It may be unfair but I can’t get over my opinion. It’s like the way you say ‘um’ right before uttering something that you think is witty – I hear that like it’s a flag signaling affectation.”

I’m sure those weren’t our exact words, but they’re close enough. The complainant was the love-of-my-life, the poet with whom I longed to starve, the man I thought I’d marry. He loved me, he loved making love to me, but he didn’t love my laugh. I thought at the time that his words were cruel; I see now that the situation was impossible.

I once knew a woman engaged to a man who didn’t like her smell. I’m not talking about any scent behind her ears, and I can assure you she bathed often enough. I remember feeling a little superior to her, knowing that I wouldn’t have stayed with the guy, or to be more honest, I never would have been with him in the first place. But now I see how much worse it would be to stay with someone who hates my laugh.

Chris and I met when I came to Cal. He was one of a small group of guys, sophomores, mostly from the East Coast. Chris was born and raised in Palo Alto, but his family lived then near Washington, DC, so maybe it made sense for him to hang around with a bunch from Delaware. I don’t know. I never asked. Come to think about it, I don’t have an inkling of how he spent his first year at Cal. I was so into myself then that it was like Chris came into existence, 18 and whole, when I met him.

Did he hate my laugh then? Maybe. Because the truth is, we didn’t like each other. We fell into immediate disagreement about something, and we continued disagreeing as our groups, a circle of California freshwomen and another of Eastern sophomoric boys, wriggled our way to intersection.

Chris and I became a couple a month or so later, after an encounter in Sproul Plaza produced a disagreement which we decided for some reason to walk off. We headed south together on Telegraph Avenue, and before we got to Ashby we weren’t disagreeing so much.

I recall finding him attractive. He had beautiful curling red-gold hair, without being obnoxiously freckled. His forearms were well-shaped and firm. He wasn’t my male ideal, but he was taller than I and weighed more and had bigger hands and feet than I do, and he was intellectually and poetically stimulating.

But then again I wonder. He didn’t resemble the dark-haired wide-chested man of my dreams. And the sex, when we got to that (it took a little while, because we were each inexperienced, and he was more hesitant than I wished) was sweet and loving but not exciting.

I sensed then and know now that we were both good people, so even though we were never a match made in heaven, we were friends, we agreed more than we disagreed, and our disagreements were academic and honorable. We were two young people about to take our flights, poised on the edge of the nest angling forward for the drop that would swoop us aloft, and our hands fit well together for that exercise.

We were together for most of our college years, which seemed like a lifetime unto itself. But Christopher and I didn’t marry. We didn’t spend our lives together or even live in the same area.

I have attributed our failure at times to his psychotic break. Once or twice I accused his ineffectual dad of killing it for me, when he asked me to take care of Chris for him. But now what I mostly remember is the time Chris told me that he couldn’t abide my laugh.

We broke up. We almost got back together but then I decided to marry Adam. And then Glen. It turned out I wasn’t very good at marriage, but it also turned out that neither of my husbands made a particularly impressive run of their lives. I’m less disappointed and happier alone. Chris never managed to find someone. He lived solo and celibate after we split up, eventually becoming a teacher and then a professor. Chris lived a life I respect. That was one of the surprises, for me.

Now here we are at the end, never able to get our timing to agree enough to be together again. Both still sweet and loving, and each respecting what the other has done. Who’d have thought it? And who’d have thought that now, of all times now, now when the cancer has just about killed him, Chris would be telling me jokes, trying to cheer me, assuring me how much he loves my laugh.