Monologue Of Mel Ginnis

My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right.
The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink. There were Mel and me and his second wife, Teresa-Terri, we called her--and my wife, Laura. We lived in Albuquerque then. But we were all from somewhere else. There was an ice bucket on the table. The gin and the tonic water kept going around, and we somehow got on the subject of love. Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love.
He said he'd spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important
Then Terri said, "He beat me up one night. He dragged me around the living room by my ankles.
He kept saying, `I love you, I love you, you bitch.' He went on dragging me around the living room. My head kept knocking on things." Terri looked around the table. "What do you do with love like that?"
5 She was a bone-thin woman with a pretty face, dark eyes, and brown hair that hung down her back. She liked necklaces made of turquoise, and long, pendant earrings.
"My God, don't be silly. That's not love, and you know it, Mel said. "I don't know what you'd call it, but I sure know you wouldn't call it love."
"Say what you want to, but I know it was," Terri said, "It may sound crazy to you, but it's true just the same. People are different, Mel. Sure, sometimes he may have acted crazy. Okay.
But he loved me. In his own way maybe, but he loved me. There was love there, Mel. Don't say there wasn't.”
Mel let out his breath. He held his glass and turned to Laura and me. "The man threatened to kill me," Mel said. He finished his drink and reached for the gin bottle. “Terri's a romantic. Terri's of the kick-me-so-I'll-know-you-love-me school. Terri, hon, don't look that way." Mel
Laura leaned forward with her glass. She put her elbows on the table and held her glass in both hands. She glanced from Mel to Terri and waited with a look of bewilderment on her open face, as if amazed that such things happened to people you were friendly with.
"How'd he bungle it when he killed himself?" I said.
“I'll tell you what happened," Mel said. "He took this twenty-two pistol he'd bought to threaten
Terri and me with. Oh, I'm serious. The man was always threatening. You should have seen the way we lived in those days. Like fugitives. I even bought a gun myself. Can you believe it? A guy like me? But I did, I bought one for self-defense and carried it in the glove compartment.
Sometimes I'd have to leave the apartment in the middle of the night. To go to the hospital, you know? Terri and l weren't married then, and my first wife had the house and kids, the dog, everything, and Terri and I were living in this apartment here. Sometimes, as I say, I'd get a call in the middle of the night and have to go in to the hospital at two or three in the morning. It'd be dark out there in the parking lot, and I'd break into a sweat be fore I could even get to my car. I