“Well,” I said, “not
She smiled brilliantly. There was something about her that seemed to require flirtation. And when the requirement was filled, it pleased her.
“I’ll keep it in mind,” she said.
“So how about the harassment?” I said.
“The son of a bitch won’t give up,” she said. “Can you make him stop?”
“The son of a bitch being whom?”
“Burt, the bastard – I hope you don’t mind swearing, I can’t help it, I have a terrible mouth.”
“I’ll be all right,” I said. “Burt is your husband?”
“Ex-husband,” she said.
“And you know he’s doing this?”
“Who else.” She leaned forward and her voice became a little girl’s. “Could you beat him up for me?”
She had more affect than a Miss America contestant. Her voice went from contralto to soprano in an easy glissade. Her eyes widened and narrowed as she spoke. Everything she said, she dramatized. She went from seductress to child in an exhale. I was willing to bet she’d cry before I left. I was pretty sure she could cry at will.
“We’ll see,” I said. “Could anyone else be harassing you?”
She cast her eyes down.
“No,” she said softly. “Who else but Burt would have any reason?”
“Tell me about your boyfriend,” I said.
She kept her eyes downcast and was silent. It was a pose, but I didn’t think it was an insincere one. In fact I didn’t find her insincere at all. Rather she seemed to have been playing this role, whatever it was, for so long, that she probably didn’t have any idea when she was sincere and when she wasn’t.
“I can’t talk about him,” she said.
“Why not?” I said.
She raised her head and she was angry, or seemed to be.
“I’m not hiring you to cross-examine me.”
“You’re not hiring me at all, yet,” I said. “This is foreplay. See if we like each other.”
“You only work for people you like?”
“I only work for people I want to,” I said.
She smiled suddenly. It was quite spectacular.
“You’ll want to work for me,” she said.
“So what about the boyfriend?”
The smile went away.
“Must you?”
“‘Fraid so,” I said.
“Is it confidential?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “But it’s not privileged.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you hired me through your attorney,” I said, “under certain circumstances what you told him, and he told me, could be privileged. As it stands now, I won’t tell anyone, but it is not privileged. If it is information required by the police in the course of an investigation, or a prosecutor in the course of a trial, then if I’m asked I have to tell.”
“Police?”
“I’m just trying to be clear,” I said. “I don’t expect to tell anyone.”
“If you told anyone I’d die.”
“I’ll try to remember that.”
We were quiet. She was thinking, and, as she did everything else, she dramatized thinking. Her eyes narrowed, she got a vertical wrinkle between her eyebrows. Her lips pursed slightly. I waited. Finally she leaned back and shifted on the couch so that she could hug her knees while she talked.
“When we were together,” she said, “we could barely breathe. We couldn’t eat. We didn’t want to drink. All we wanted to do was be together and look at each other and make love.”
I nodded. I knew the feeling, though love had never made me lose my appetite.
“If only we were both free,” she said.
“You’re free,” I said.
She shook her head sadly and a little condescendingly.
