Bruce felt at times like he was two people, one who was jealous, possessive and prone to temper tantrums with women, and another one capable of love, calmness and respect.
Bruce never knew of Ken Copeland's existence, but threw some of his most passionate and dramatic tantrums when Samantha Lazare became friends with Daniel Torrent.
The calm Bruce was ashamed of the tempestuous one and wished he was not so prone to lose control. He often had no advance notice of the other Bruce's behavior, and therefore no chance to intervene to prevent it. One moment Bruce would be functioning within normal tolerances, and the next he would be screaming and even breaking crockery. At such moments, he knew he frightened people. Though he had never actually hit a woman, Bruce believed he was capable of it and worse.
At McKinsey, Bruce was regarded as a bright young man of promise, but something of a prima donna. If overruled or contradicted, he might fly off the handle. He couldn't tolerate disorganization among his peers, and he didn't do well when he sensed that he was more intelligent than his elders.
During the next few years, the calm Bruce worked out that the angry Bruce's problem was an excess of passion. Angry Bruce was always larger than his circumstances, a container for a restless liquid looking for an outlet. Bruce had never yet been really engaged by anything, not football or the MBA program or McKinsey.
Two years after going to work at McKinsey, Bruce married a Radcliffe woman he met at Harvard. It was a terrible match, based on a rescue fantasy: she was a poet of only mild talent, and prone to alcoholism. After her graduation, she took and quickly was fired from several jobs with publishers and literary agencies. Finally she sat at home, drinking, pitying herself and talking about having a child. She had masochistic tendencies, and when they had terrible fights about something she had said or done, she would say, "Then why don't you hit me?" Bruce understood years later that she must have wanted to be hit; but the day he blacked her eye stood in lifelong memory as the low point of his life. They were divorced, and Bruce resigned from McKinsey. He turned to the Catholic church in which he had been raised, and ultimately applied his huge passion to running a homeless shelter in South Boston.