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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.
    “He can’t leave his wife.”
    “Why?”
    She shook her head again. Men were so dumb.
    “He just can’t. She’s too dependent on him, and men can’t do the hard things. He’s such a baby.”
    “Might have been smart to wait until he left her, before you left your husband,” I said.
    “I’m not that way,” she said. “When I commit, I commit entirely. I give everything.”
    “Would you have left your husband if you hadn’t thought you’d be with him?” I said.
    “And what? Live in this gruesome goddamned apartment by myself? Burt and I lived in a castle.”
    “Do you still see your boyfriend?” I said.
    Again the downcast eyes. Her mouth pouting like a sad child, albeit a cute one, she traced a small circle on her kneecap with the forefinger of her right hand.
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    She began to cry. I waited, letting the question hang. She placed both her hands over her face, being careful of her makeup, and cried some more. I was pretty sure I was supposed to go and sit on the couch and put my arm around her, in which case she would turn in and bury her head on my shoulder and weep as if her heart would break. I stayed where I was. Finally after waiting as long as was decorous she stopped crying and lowered her hands, and raised her head so she could look searchingly into my eyes.
    “Men are such babies,” she said.
    “Maybe not all of them,” I said.
    “You’re not, are you?”
    “Except when I don’t get my way,” I said.