Our relationship never got the chance to get stale when we’d lived apart. Picking each other up at the airport became a festive ritual, part of a migratory pattern. Between hot weather at my end and New England’s unpredictability I never knew what to wear. “Boots will make you look like a hooker. Wear pumps,” my friends in Florida advised. The closer the trial date, the more nervous I grew. At one of the depositions, I had faced 14 insurance attornies, all men. There was a big scene when one of the lawyers insisted my “connections” were relevant. My lawyer threatened to leave if he continued. A judge had already decided that it wasn’t. Ever since, Paul thought my lawyer was aces. I was paranoid enough to think he was on the take.

I loved living in Florida, going barefoot, and making kooky friends. Never having been a slave to fashion, I decided the compromise travel outfit would be a long, flowing dress with a high neckline and a straw hat with yellow flowers, a bit over the top even for me. My hair was cut short as a Nazi collaborator’s. The stakes were so high that all seven of the insurance companies that I was up against had hired private detectives even though a judge had decreed my connections were off limits.

“Where’d you leave your tea bags?” asked Paul, sarcastically. I caught the reference to Minnie Pearl from Grand Old Opry right away. The way he edged away, after brushing his cheek against mine, he acted as if I were an embarrassment.

“I’m supposed to be crazy,” I whispered, “sort of a cross between Mary Poppins and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Think Sound of Music and give me a break.”

It was Indian summer. The temperature at 55 came as a shock. Paul, as usual, looked like a GQ model, wearing a rakish Scally cap of cashmere, crisply creased pants, and a camel-colored sports jacket. The way he stood in his shoes, feet slightly apart, told me he wasn’t in the best of moods. He’d waited up all night to meet me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, as he carried my luggage to the car. “I got to talking in the airport and missed my flight.”

It was a short 10 minute ride across cobblestoned streets to his apartment. Without the child, who always acted as a buffer between us, things were particularly tense. Paul was worried the reporters covering my trial would get wind of him and he’d be accused of being a white slave trader or running a prostitution ring. My case was a precedent. Every other woman before me had been smart enough to take the settlement money and run. You couldn’t just sue a therapist for giving you poor advice, as far as I knew. It had to involve sex. There weren’t any rape-shield laws at the time. If I expected Paul to be supportive, I was way off base though it didn’t seem to bother him that one of his track buddies, Joey P., the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet, was the Porno King of New England, owning both a horse training farm in New Hampshire and that smutty book store in the Combat Zone, The Liberty Tree.
“The phone is tapped,” he said, as soon as I put my luggage away.

“What else is new?” He suspected that the phone was always tapped and if it wasn’t we always spoke as if it were. I was dying to discuss my case. The night before my primal shrink had nearly drowned me in a tank of water heated to 140 degrees. I was dying to tell him about that too. All Paul was concerned about was pressuring me to settle and not getting his name in the papers like the rest of his friends.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. “I’m sick of listening and I have my own problems.” He sat in what I noticed was a new orange lounge chair and handed me a piece of paper with an official-looking letterhead. The phone was really tapped! So was the Lancaster Street garage where he went every day to meet his cronies. I could tell he was struggling for control, by the stiffness in his wrists and fingers, waving his hands emphatically in short little karate chops, as he spoke.

“DON’T use the phone, he said, for the fifth time.

I was close to tears. This was some welcome. I sat there numbly looking at the piece of paper about the wire tap, wondering and worrying about how it would affect us. Then he decided to get it over with and tell me the rest. He began a bit sheepishly, hiding a nervous smirk, peppering his speech with: “you know’s”.

“When you didn’t come to the hospital for my last operation, I kind of, you know, got friendly with my ex-wife, Mickey.” Actually, I had come to the hospital for this last operation on the carotid artery. The doctor had told me it was a simple roto-rooter job and as soon as Paul was safe in recovery, I’d had to fly back for a real estate closing.

“The one you were married to thirty years ago? The hairdresser from New York?” I’d seen Mickey’s old pictures in Paul’s album. She once owned every coat check spot in town and had married a very wealthy man. She wasn’t anything for me to get excited about as there was a limit to my insecurity. The woman had to be at least 70.

“Nothing serious,” he continued. “Just companionship. She heard I was in the hospital and started coming by and bringing things. This chair, for example, because she thought I needed one.” He patted the orange plush and I could see that he was trying to hide the trembling in his fingers. Out of deference for his heart condition, I decided to let him off easy. In truth, I loved him too much to deny him any kind of happiness. I didn’t like the fact that he hadn’t been honest with me, however, so I took a stern approach.

“Ha! You didn’t think I knew about her, did you? Our little stoolie knows who to put the finger on. When Sean came back to Florida with a bunch of new clothes, he told me who gave them to him and how you left him with her for two whole days while you went to the track. And then, you took him to the track too, when you’re not even supposed to be there. For awhile he was banned from every racetrack in the country. “Taking chances like that pisses me off!”

“Well, you won’t believe what happened,” he said, smiling now that the guilt was off his shoulders. “I took her to visit my brother, Freddie, the vegetable, in the V.A. She hadn’t seen him in 20 years and she nagged me until I agreed to take her with me last Sunday.”

“How good of you,” I said, peevishly. “You never took me to visit your brother, Freddie. Guess I don’t count.”

He ignored my interruption, intent on unburdening himself further. “Freddie must have remembered something he didn’t like about her, or thought she was some flashback to the war, but he ups and pops her in the nose. Breaks her nose! Blood pouring down her face! I push him back to his room and don’t report it because I didn’t know if they would lock him up in solitary, or what, for getting violent. I mean, for 20 years this man hasn’t been out of a wheelchair, and out he jumps!”

“Incredible,” I said. “Good old Freddie.”

“And now because I was honest with her about you coming and needing a place and all, she’s hysterical. The woman is crazy, I tell you, and I don’t know what she’ll do next. But I don’t want you answering the phone.”

I was so certain of my place in his heart that I’d never even considered someone replacing me, let alone Mickey. Once again, I was stunned. “I don’t understand. Could you run that by me again? Why would she be mad if you gave me a place to stay?”

“I told you this lady is crazy. She wants to leave her husband. She’s so insanely jealous that she’s planning on getting an attorney to say that I’m the one who broke her nose!”

“Really,” I said, turning my back on him to make up the day bed for a few hours of snatched sleep. All the tension had worn me out. “Serves you right for thinking you were pulling one over on me.”

“Seriously, baby. You know no one could ever come between us.” His voice could purr when he wanted it to, but I wasn’t buying. I never forgot the sign that hung in my dormitory my whole college freshman year: ALL MEN ARE BASTARDS. The building was the closest in the quadrangle to the gym and loaded with phys ed majors, some of whom might have been in the throes of sexual identity quandaries. Probably the very reason I hooked up with a guy twice my age was so that I didn’t have to worry about losing him, which is not to say I actually trusted. I just figured it gave me a bit of an edge if all men were chasers anyway.

“And furthermore, I did too show up at the hospital. I dropped everything to be with you, but I had to fly back to take care of business. Who would have thought the minute my back was turned....”

To make a long story short, my trial was postponed and Mickey came to know I was a permanent attachment. One night when Paul wasn’t there we had a long talk on the phone. She had nothing good to say about him and even though I knew most of it was true, she sure was fighting hard to get him back. She wanted 20 thousand to keep Paul’s probation inviolate! For all I know, I could have been set up by them both, but after I got a check from one of the insurance companies, I gave it to Paul, who was supposed to give it to Mickey. I think he blew it at the track.