everyone. He was somehow distant, even in the most intimate of moments, even with the most intimate of companions.”
“Like you,” Jesse said.
“Like me, like every other woman, like every other person.”
“What was the secret?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t even know how to ask him. He would have said there was no secret, that he wasn’t distant.”
“Maybe he would have been right,” Jesse said.
“No,” Ellen said. “He was distant. There was a silent space around him.”
“Maybe he was just an interior guy,” Jesse said.
“Like you,” she said.
“Me?”
“Yes. You are very interior, and there is a shield of silence around you, too.”
“But do I have a sad secret?”
“I don’t know you well enough,” Ellen said. “But if I slept with you for five years, I would know.”
Jesse smiled.
“Not the worst idea I ever heard,” Jesse said.
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H I G H P R O F I L E
“I am too old for you,” Ellen said.
“No,” Jesse said. “You’re not.”
Ellen smiled and bowed her head slightly toward Jesse in acknowledgment.
“I always thought it was connected to the womanizing,”
she said.
“Womanizing,” Jesse said.
“Yes. He was compulsive,” she said.
“You think he did it because of his, ah, secret?” Jesse said.
“Or that it was his secret?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “What I do know is that no matter how many women he had, his aloneness remained visceral.”
“He was arrested outside Baltimore,” Jesse said. “In 1987, for public indecency.”
Ellen smiled sadly.
“No doubt with a young woman,” she said.
“Yes. In the backseat of a car in the parking lot of a shopping mall.”
“He liked young women,” Ellen said.
