It was none of his business but I could see telling him that was not an acceptable response. “I don’t remember exactly,” I said.
“More than ten times?” he asked.
I went through the motions of thinking about it. “Well…” I said.
“More than fifteen? More than twenty?”
“It’s possible,” I said.
“I’ll take that for a yes,” he said, writing something down that seemed longer than the word Yes. “How many times did you have sex with another person during that first month?”
“One,” I confessed, stretching the truth.
“What was the gender of your partner?”
“What?”
“Man or woman?”
“Woman.”
“Was she younger than your former wife or older?”
“I don’t know… Younger, I suppose.”
He smiled inappropriately. “Was this someone you had met when you were still living with your wife?”
“I’d rather not answer that,” I said, perhaps unnecessarily wary.
“I’ll take that as a Yes,” he said.
“If you do,” I said, “you could well be making a mistake.”
“This kind of fencing is not much use to either of us,” he said. “I promise you that your name will not appear with your answers. My assumption is that if you hadn’t met this partner before you and Molly separated, you would have no problem telling me that.”
We got no further with the interview. Without announcing themselves first, the women reappeared.
“How’s it going?” Leonora asked. “Getting a lot of good stuff?”
“We’ll probably need another twenty to thirty minutes,” Donald said.
“Don’t be such a stick, Donald,” Molly said, giving him a light kick in the leg. “Jake looks all talked out to me. Besides he’s never been able to tell the truth for more than fifteen minutes on end.” Leonora laughed on cue while Donald studied his notes.
Odd, I thought, she had never called me Jake before. Was this the wrong house? Was she the wrong former wife?
44th Night
Donald never finished the interview with me, but said when I reminded him that he had used his God-given gift for empathy to fill in the remaining answers for me. I was planning to ask him if he had done the same with other subjects as well — the man had no shortage of overweaning confidence — but I never got the chance since he and Leonora disappeared together the next day.
“Hey, it’s like déjà vu,” I said to Molly, referring to our being alone together, but she was not so easily consoled, and at the same time locked in denial.
“He always comes back,” she said, “dragging his tail behind him.”
I didn’t know what she meant. “Are you saying that he’s done this before?” I asked.
“Never,” she said, “though he tends to be absent-minded and sometimes loses his way.” She giggled at a memory that excluded me. “You know, it could be circumstantial that Donald and your floosie are missing at the same time. What’s your opinion?”
“Could be they both lost their way,” I said.
“When we were this official couple,” she said, “you were never this supportive. It seems to me you’ve matured since our break-up.” She offered me her hand for safekeeping.
Later, after a dinner of left-overs, which seemed fitting, sitting close to me on our old couch, she mentioned that she happened to glance at Donald’s notes from his interview with me and she had a question of her own she wanted to ask.
I knew no good would come of it, though I pretended I had no objection to being asked another question.
“Okay,” she said. “This other partner of female gender you mention, okay, this so-called younger person, was she on the scene before we were smart enough to separate?”
I saw no point in hesitating. “No,” I said
She laughed and pointed a finger at me. “That’s not what you told Donald. There’s no reason anymore not to tell the truth I’d appreciate it as an old friend — tell me the truth just this once.”
I could not remember what I told Donald nor was I sure what the truth was, the combination making me uneasy. I told the only truth I knew. “I don’t like being interrogated,” I said.
“Is that because lying makes you uncomfortable?” she asked.
After our first five intermittently blissful years together, Molly tended to put the most unflattering interpretations to the motives for my behavior. It didn’t help that she was at times (not that I ever admitted it) disconcertingly on the mark. It’s hard to live with someone so relentlessly intuitive. Eventually I confessed the worst, usually through the evasions of denial.
Caught up in nostalgia, I said to her, “When I was living with you, you were the only woman I ever loved.”
“Liar,” she said, and turned her face away so I wouldn’t notice that she was almost crying. I could tell that she wanted to throw something at me and I left the room to save her from her worst instincts.
45th Night
When Donald wasn’t interviewing for his sex book, he gave private classes in Self-Confidence and Public Speaking to corporate executives on the rise. In the interest of continuity and contributing to the upkeep of the house, Molly suggested that I take on Donald’s students until the prodigal managed his return.
I let it be known that self-confidence and public speaking were not areas of my expertise, but Molly said in the larger context that hardly mattered. She said self-confidence should be everyone’s expertise and she gave me a book Donald had written on the subject called, “You Are The Best You Even If You Don’t Know It,” which I found difficult to penetrate though I read almost every word, dozing from time to time but managing to get the pages turned. I had a sense of accomplishment when I finished the book, let myself believe I was ready to take on whatever came my way.
I had taught some over the years, but I had never imagined myself teaching Donald’s subject.
I tried different approaches. With my first client, a shy stutterer in his early thirties, who had inherited his hated father’s business, I did most of the talking, invented an expertise for my character that of course had no basis outside of the imagination’s presumption. After listening to twenty minutes or so of my inspirational prattle, the client got up from his chair and walked to the door.
“Is there a problem?” I asked.
“Please,” he said, speaking with more fluency than he had when he came in. “You sound just like my father.” I suppose I knew what he meant. In any event, I had been so full of myself during my encouraging talk, his walking out on me was a crushing blow.
I took the opposite tack with my next client, kept silent through most of the session while the man, a baby-faced hotshot executive still in his twenties, famous for his mercurial rise in the movie business, recited his shortcomings. At the end of the hour, he asked me my opinion on what he had been saying.
Having mostly tuned out through most of his tiresome recitation, I said that I mostly agreed with his assessment.
“Then why does everyone else in the world think I’m so great?” he said with unexpected belligerence.
“I can’t imagine,” I said.
“I get what you’re doing, man,” he said. “It’s brilliant, man, but I hate that kind of low-rent psychology. Totally hate it. I don’t have to take shit from anyone, man, and that includes you.” He was a small man but he stood in front of me, stood over me, with his fists balled. “When I feel this way, I want to kick someone’s ass.”