elaborate, to speculate into her own motives and to question her own actions in retrospect. Gone, too, was her vulnerability, which, even as it had been her undoing in the morning session, had also stamped her tes timony with the unmistakable imprimatur of genuineness. Jaywalker strongly suspected that she was not only aware that she was closing up, but that she'd even made a conscious choice to do so. It was as though she'd resolved to make a tradeoff, so determined was she to keep hold of her emotional equilibrium, even if doing so came at the expense of her cred ibility with the jury. And while Jaywalker could understand and even appreciate her decision, he didn't let it stop him from trying to draw her out whenever an opportunity pre sented itself, even as she dug her heels in and resisted.
MR. JAYWALKER: Did the relationship con tinue, after that first morn ing?
MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes, it did.
MR. JAYWALKER: Would you describe its progress for us, please.
MS. TANNENBAUM: The only way I can describe it is to say that Barry courted me. I know that's kind of a foolish, old-fashioned word, but that's what he did, he courted me.
MR. JAYWALKER: Tell us what you mean by that.
MS. TANNENBAUM: I mean that we dated. We went to movies. He bought me flowers. We held hands. We talked for hours on end. Again, nothing like that had ever happened to me before.
MR. JAYWALKER: Was there a sexual compo nent to the relationship?
MS. TANNENBAUM: Not at first, no. The truth was, I never found Barry terribly attractive. Not only was he a lot older than I was, but, well, he wasn't the best looking guy in the world. So there was an attrac tion, but it wasn't a sexual one. It was more like holding hands, kissing, saying nice things to each other. It was about tenderness, I guess.
MR. JAYWALKER: Did you like that?
MS. TANNENBAUM: Like it? I absolutely loved it. I'd never known there was such a thing.
She described how the relationship had progressed from those first days. Barry had been called back to New York on business, but he phoned her each day, sent her cards, had flowers delivered. Not gaudy displays, but small, tasteful bouquets. She remembered a half dozen yellow roses, for example, arriving on the sixth day after they'd met. Still, she never suspected he had money, not until a fellow cocktail waitress made a comment about her sugar daddy. When Samara looked puzzled by the reference, the other waitress dismissed her with a 'Yeah, right.' But the next day the waitress showed up with a recent issue of People magazine, featuring a story about the ten richest bachelors in America. Barry was number one. Samara had stared at his photograph for a full five minutes, trying to make the connection between the man she was falling in love with and the one staring out from the pages.
Whatever lingering doubts she had disappeared a few weeks later, when Barry, forced to cancel a return trip to Vegas for business reasons, asked Samara to come to New York instead. She explained that even were she willing to risk almost certainly losing her job by doing so, she didn't have enough money to buy a bus ticket. He told her that wouldn't be necessary, he'd send one of his planes for her.
One of his planes.
For Samara, being in New York City was like being Cinderella at the ball. Barry bought her clothes and jewelry, wined and dined her, took her to the theater, a concert, the ballet and the opera. She hadn't even known there was such a thing as the opera. They went to bed, finally, but even that was nothing like she'd ever experienced. They did it on silk sheets in his penthouse apartment, overlooking the twinkling lights of Manhattan. And instead of it being all about his satisfaction, it was all about hers. Instead of seeking to possess her, all he seemed to want was to please her. Unlike all of her prior Wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am experiences, with Barry it wasn't over just because he was done. It wasn't over until they lay in each other's arms, marveling over their good fortune at having met. In a word, it was love, something that Samara had never come close to tasting in all of her eighteen years. Not as an infant, not as an adolescent, not as a teenager, not as the adult she'd become long before she should have.
MR. JAYWALKER: What was your reaction to all this?
MS. TANNENBAUM: I was overwhelmed. Who wouldn't be? I was in heav en. And yet
MR. JAYWALKER: And yet?
MS. TANNENBAUM: And yet I kept waiting for the clock to strike midnight. I kept waiting to wake up and find out it was over. Every time Barry would open his mouth, I'd hold my breath, figuring he was about to ask me to take my things and leave.
MR. JAYWALKER: Did he ever ask you to leave?
MS. TANNENBAUM: No. He asked me to marry him.
They were married six months later, in a small civil ceremony in Scarsdale, where Barry had a home, or, as Samara put it, a mansion straight out of Gone with the Wind. She'd signed a bunch of papers beforehand, which Barry's lawyers and accountants had put in front of her, in cluding a prenuptial agreement that, as it was explained to her, would leave her out on the street were she ever to file for divorce. She couldn't have cared less. She'd been out on the street for eighteen years, one way or another, and had had her fill of it. And the thought of her ever divorcing Barry seemed about as likely as her walking on the moon.
Outside of storybooks, of course, nothing lasts forever, all things come to an end, and it's rare indeed that the prince and princess ride off into the sunset to live happily ever after. It was certainly no accident that Barry had left a trail of three failed marriages in his wake prior to meeting Samara, no small thing that he was forty-four years older than she, and not to be overlooked that they came from backgrounds so divergent that they might as well have been from different planets altogether. The two-week hon eymoon in Paris was interrupted hourly by mergers and ac quisitions, by IPOs and CFOs, by board meetings and boards of inquiry. A month into the marriage, Samara woke up to the reality that for Barry, business came first, second and third. There was a good reason why he'd risen through the ranks of the wealthiest bachelors in America to the top spot, an honor relinquished now only on something of a mere technicality, at least to Barry's way of thinking. And that reason was his single-minded, almost pathological dedication to maintaining his financial empire. It was as though, on the heels of his third divorce, Barry had flown out to Las Vegas to re-up, to find himself a replacement wife. He'd found her, taken a brief sabbatical, just long enough to consolidate her (what Samara had described as courting) and marry her. Once that had been checked off the agenda, it was back to business as usual.
With Barry's attention turned from the lines of his wife's bottom to the bottom line, the marriage never had a chance. Samara found herself alone in a city so alien to her that she was literally afraid to go out. She had no friends; there were no clubs for gold diggers, no meetings of Former Trailer Trash Anonymous, no chapter of Prairie Creek, Indiana, junior-high-school dropouts. She begged Barry to find her a job, any kind of job. But he refused, insisting that no wife of his would ever embarrass him by working. A family was out of the question: Barry already had five children and twelve grandchildren from his previous marriages, and though his alimony and support payments cost him only a negligible fraction of his wealth, he was pretty much es tranged from all his progeny, and infuriated by the idea of paying them anything or potentially increasing their num bers. Even lovemaking became an extremely rare event.
MR. JAYWALKER: Tell us about that.
MS. TANNENBAUM: At first I thought Barry's being so gentle in bed was all about tenderness. Soon I realized that wasn't it at all. He was a hypochondriac, one of those people who are convinced they're dying but are afraid to go the doctor because they might find out that they're right. Or that they're wrong and are just flat-out crazy. He'd had a heart attack some years back and was afraid that exerting himself during sex with someone much younger than him might give him an other one and kill him. And he'd read somewhere on his computer-that's where he got all his medical ad vice from-that there'd been this experiment that showed that producing sperm takes a lot out of mice, and they live shorter lives as a result. Barry figured the same had to be true with humans. So he tried not to come-you know, to ejaculate-because he was afraid that every time he did, it meant there went an other month off his life span.
With no friends, no social life, no sex life, no job and no hope of raising a family, it didn't take long for Samara to become resentful of Barry and rebel against him. Her rebellion took the form of overcoming her fears and ven turing outside. But not during the day, to shop or sightsee or pamper herself, as Barry encouraged her to. Instead,
