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Modern Love

Firefighter Chases Woman Down Street

Divided by race, politics and pasts, they found a place with each other … until they didn’t.

Credit...Brian Rea

The firefighter and I met on one of the rare days I decided to wear lipstick. If I had to guess at a reason for him chasing me down the street that day, it was the lipstick. It always does something to my face.

To be honest, I was so close to shutting him down. Here I was, on my way home from work, a block and a half from my Manhattan apartment, already mentally having shed my shoes and bra, and here was this firefighter — a bald, white, middle-aged New York City cliché I had passed on the sidewalk with his buddies — rushing to catch up. He stopped me in my tracks and wasted no time: “I think you’re a beautiful woman. When are you going to let me take you out?”

Not if he could, but when.

I would come to love his chutzpah.

I’m a sucker, so I fell for it, and to this day I can’t tell you why I decided to give him my phone number. Somewhere in the middle of being distracted by what I thought was his lack of eyebrows, I realized that I neither wanted to lie to him nor could I find any real reason to say no. I figured: He’s a civil servant; how crazy can he be?

Of course, not five minutes later, standing alone in my apartment, I convinced myself that this date would be a disaster; we had nothing in common and he was going to be dumb as a brick. I’m a snob; I accept this about myself.

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Two days later, during our first phone call, he broke out of any box I tried to put him in. An avid music fan, he wanted to visit Macon, Georgia, because of the Allman Brothers. He shocked me by knowing Emory University, my alma mater, saying “That’s where they shot ‘Into the Wild.’”

He was a travel fiend. He hoped to hike down through Gibraltar and work his way into Northern Africa, doing volunteer work along the way. He was a hell of a lot more interesting than I, in my snobbery, had given him space to be.

When I told him I was looking forward to dinner, I meant it.

On our first date, we discovered that we both came from families of addiction: alcoholism, substance abuse. He hadn’t managed to escape that legacy, telling me he was now eight years sober.

I had noticed this about him before he told me about any legacy. When he asked me how I knew, I said, “You never looked at the drink menu.”

People say addicts can walk into a room and spot other addicts. I wonder if that truth holds for those like me who teeter on the edge of that slippery slope, trying like hell not to fall while wondering if it isn’t just easier to give in.

We also learned that spirituality served as an anchor for us both. He came from good Irish Catholic stock but had been a bit of a prodigal son and was slowly making his way back through daily prayer, Bible reading and meditation. I am a hopeful agnostic in a wrestling match with the God of my childhood. The Lord may eventually pin me down, but he will need to pop out my hip to do so.

Politics were another story, surfacing somewhere in hour two of our first date — conservative libertarian (him) versus bleeding heart liberal (me). After dinner, we strolled through the center of Tarrytown, jabbering nonstop. He was an unstoppable force while I — arms crossed, eyebrow cocked — remained an immovable object.

We debated whether people suffering from mental illness, particularly those who pose a threat to themselves and others, should be required to take medication or be institutionalized. Armed with facts and conviction, he argued yes. I disagreed, noting abuses that have occurred in those types of systems.

Still, I could see his point.

Back in the car, city-bound, with abortion the topic, he said his Catholicism kept him from viewing the act as anything but murder. As a recovering evangelical, I get it. I believed that, too, for a long time — until I thought I was pregnant after a night of being drunk in my 20s. I realized abortion was a right I would readily claim and could not in good conscience declare myself anti-abortion if I was so ready to choose it for myself.

Crossing into Manhattan, he let it fly that he didn’t think racism in New York City was as bad as people claimed. My roots are in the South — I am a descendant of slaves — and I’m always looking for somebody to say something stupid about racism so I can lose my mind.

But I didn’t with him, instead pointing out that racism is not only about extreme acts, like burning crosses. Racism exists on a spectrum, and those microaggressions I’ve experienced — being asked why I always look so angry, or finding out a man has stopped seeing me because his family doesn’t want him dating a black woman (you would think I had learned my lesson) — may seem minuscule to him but cut me deep after a while, enough small slices to cut off a limb.

He went quiet at that, a sign I would later understand to be him seriously considering what I had said, because — yes, happily, there were more dates and even more debates, each one digging deeper into controversial issues.

“But don’t you think — ” he would start, knowing good and well I didn’t think whatever was about to come out of his mouth. I would dive into a debate that should have been contentious and belligerent but never was. We never hit an off-limit topic, including police interactions with people of color.

When he let loose about how officers have a hard job and sometimes “unfortunate” things happen, it took all of my hard-earned Southern charm to answer diplomatically. Because unlike mental illness or even abortion, I had living, breathing skin in this particular game.

My father was born in southern Georgia in the 1950s, and like a lot of men of his generation, he struggled with addiction. He is 6 feet 4, dark-skinned, hawk-eyed and curmudgeonly. All he wants to do is sit on a porch, drink beer and watch “The Flash.” But thanks to our country’s legacy of racism, his very being is perceived as a threat.

I worry about him every time he makes the three-hour drive from Atlanta to Albany, Georgia, where I was born. I’m scared that some state patrol officer will see my father’s big hands and long limbs and think he has to “fear” for his own life.

What I needed was context for the firefighter’s point of view, which I got one warm summer evening when we met in Central Park for a concert. As we approached the SummerStage entrance, we passed two patrol officers who were eyeing everyone’s comings and goings, and he said, “My dad and uncle used to work out of the precinct a few blocks away.”

And boom — the light bulb turned on, the heavens opened, a chorus broke out in song (but that might have been the concert).

That one sentence, as casually as he let it slip, created a huge shift in my perspective. His defense of police officers made sense, because these were no longer abstract issues; this was personal. This was life. He and I carried the weight of our fathers, his a cop, mine a black man in America. Every day, we each worried about our own father’s safety.

I never asked him much about growing up with a father who was a cop. I wish I had. Instead, we drifted apart because he (as he put it) was like Jack Nicholson’s character in “As Good as It Gets”: not ready for long-term commitment and unsure he would ever be ready. I later learned the truth: He was afraid of having a marriage like his parents’ often strained union. That broke my heart.

So imagine my shock when, seven months after we stopped seeing each other, I Googled him (bad idea) and found his obituary. He had died suddenly on vacation, circumstances unexplained. The reality of it, discovered in such a casual way, broke my heart a second time. Even though we hadn’t lasted, the way we had bridged the political and cultural divide was refreshing. It was love. The world seemed darker without him.

After his death, while sitting in my apartment, I asked him if he could hear me. And when I fled outside in search of escape, there were two fire trucks.

I knew he wasn’t on either rig, but their presence at that moment made me think, yeah, he heard me, just as he always did.

Marlena Brown works in book publicity in New York City.

Modern Love can be reached at modernlove@nytimes.com.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section ST, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Firefighter Chases Woman Down Street. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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