It began uneventfully enough. The ER was packed full of patients, most of whom clung tenuously to life. It was past midnight and, as usual, I was the only ER physician working. While writing orders at the nursing station, I glanced up to find a stunningly beautiful woman walking by. When I saw the wristband that indicated she was a patient, I was more thrilled than I would have been if I had won the Lotto. That meant I would have a chance to talk with her. Just one problem, though. My other patients. They had come to the ER on a pell-mell journey toward death, and it was my job to save them. Accomplishing that feat would take a few hours.

Patiently, she waited. Introducing myself, I felt discombobulated by her whiplash-inducing beauty. Her face was gorgeous at rest, but when she'd talk or smile, it moved in an indescribably delicious dance, sending waves of rapture through my increasingly apoplectic mind. I'd never before, or since, seen a face move that way—a way that, until then, I would have thought to be impossible.

To her cat, though, that face was not a work of art to be treasured, but a launching pad to escape from a feline nightmare. Lori's cat had been sleeping on her pillow when he suddenly awoke in terror. Bolting for the confines of safety, his claws had shredded a 5-inch patch of skin on the side of Lori's face. I'd seen plenty of cat scratches before, but never anything this deep. Undoing that damage would require more than an hour of meticulous work, not enough time for my discombobulation to dissipate, but sufficient time to flirt. I offered to remove her stitches myself, and she accepted. Sure, it was primarily a ruse to see her again, but I also deemed it medically necessary. Lori's personal physician was not noted for his surgical skill, and the thought of him clumsily attempting to remove the tiny stitches that I'd so carefully placed left me cringing.

A few days passed and it was time for suture removal. I drove to her home and removed the stitches. A professional success, but a personal disappointment. I was almost ready to leave and she had not reciprocated any interest. Being realistic about my chances of dating a goddess, this hardly surprised me. Then she said that she wanted to see my house. This could mean that she had an interest in architecture, or me. I was hoping for the latter.

A few months later, she told me that her interest in my home was simply her ruse to see me again. Necessarily coy, I thought at the time.

We tried dating, if you can call it that. Most of our “dates” consisted of her stopping by for a couple hours so that we could have dinner together before I went into the ER for the night shift. In addition to my weekday shifts, I worked every other weekend. On my weekends off, I would have loved to get together with Lori so that we could spend more time together. However, she arranged her schedule so that she would drive 300 miles north to visit her parents when I was off. When I worked the weekend, she would stay home.

After a few months of this, I knew it could not be a coincidence. I suggested that I would like to accompany her when she visited her parents, but she never agreed to that. She worked a 9-to-5 job during the week, with all weekends off. She had the flexibility to change her weekend plans, but obviously did not want to. Eventually, she explained that she spent a lot of time with her last boyfriend, and things didn't work out, so she thought that her odds of having a successful relationship might improve if she spent less time with me. Or so she said—it's difficult to believe that anyone could actually think that.

I don't know if it was Lori, or me, or some terminal incompatibility between us, but I can't recall one second in which I felt comfortable in her presence. Perhaps I was intimidated by her beauty, or perhaps it was something else. Shortly after she met one of my brothers, he took me aside and said, “Kevin, she's as cold as a damned ice cube!”

In an instant, this opinion crystallized the nagging doubts I had about our potential compatibility. Indeed, she did not seem to exude much affection toward me. At the time, I tried to excuse such coolness as being a manifestation of shyness. That may have contributed to some degree, but I think the problem may have had another fundamental root: namely, that her relative indifference to me stemmed from her doubts about whether I was the best catch that she could realistically obtain. Lori wasn't unique in this regard, because almost all people, consciously or not, try to assess if they might land a more desirable spouse by dumping the person they're now dating and resuming their search for someone even better.

With this in mind, I put myself in Lori's shoes. Anyone as stunningly gorgeous as she was could marry just about any man . . . so why should she content herself with an ER doc who looked like me?

Perhaps there was another explanation. Her first husband was tall, but otherwise not particularly attractive. He drove a sandwich truck, and supplemented their income by growing marijuana in their apartment, which he both used and sold. Lori said that he once tried to reassure her by saying, “If you hear sirens a few minutes after I leave, don't be alarmed.”

I've never had much self-esteem in the dating department, but try as I may to deprecate myself, I found it difficult to believe that I wasn't a better catch than someone like this, whom she once found worthy of making her husband. I doted on her and treated her like royalty. Anything she wanted, I gave. I took her out to eat umpteen times, made meals for her, baked her goodies, composed a song for her that took me a week to create on my computer, invented something to satisfy one of her whims, and generally bent over backward to please her in every possible way. Yet her apparent enthusiasm for me was tepid, at best. I can't recall anything special that she did for me, other than send a few Hallmark cards.

After we broke up (predictably), she married again, this time to a man who beat her. I then began to wonder if her problem wasn't a surplus of self-esteem, but rather a lack of it. Perhaps, deep down, she thought little of herself, despite her ravishing looks, and gravitated toward men who reinforced that opinion by treating her miserably. Her appearance might seem to make her a prime candidate for the beautiful woman syndrome, but her choice of husbands suggested otherwise.

My only regret is that she never got to know the real me. I was so intimidated by her that I never felt free enough to reveal my true personality. Who knows—perhaps she was doing the same thing?

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