“She works very hard at not interfering in my personal life,” Leigh had said. “My dad was an intellectual, a Bohemian, more so than my mom…and I’m a spoiled and indulged only child. They treated me like an adult from the time I was three. I don’t want her to start worrying about me now.”

Over the next several weeks John began to understand that he had landed himself in a peculiar and extraordinary situation. When Jess had been twenty-one she had married a forty-year-old eccentric genius and produced one gifted child. Leigh. Cal, a very successful, prizewinning scientist, was so well-known and well traveled that Leigh had lived a privileged, highly educated life. She had graduated at the age of nineteen from Princeton and received a master’s degree by twenty-one. Math and philosophy, a unique combination, were her specialties. She also spoke four languages, painted, sculpted, wrote poetry and plays, played the piano, to say nothing of all she had read.

Also she had two left feet and often seemed sidetracked by some huge idea; she lost things, missed turns, bounced checks. It made him laugh; she could work on some complex math theory containing more letters than numbers—not to mention strange symbols—but forget to balance her checkbook or make deposits. She was brilliant. John began to slowly understand that Leigh had been far more than Max’s secretary; she had several degrees of her own, including a Ph.D. in Physics.

John, by contrast, had a high-school diploma and, when he met Leigh, was a ski bum who played Mr. Fix-it and Mr. Yardman from April to October so he could make just enough money to ski all winter. He was emotionally and materially unencumbered and led a loose, fast life. After Leigh left Durango, he found he was so much in demand that he hired young men with similar agendas to work in a little business that had since become a hefty operation. He had been raised in Denver by an airline mechanic and a housewife, and was the youngest of four boys. He did not like the big city and had never understood, nor cared to understand things like stock leveraging, quantum physics or DNA, nor did he read anything more complicated than the sports weeklies. But, boy, could he plant a flowering plum. If he died in summer, he would go to heaven with dirt under his nails.

They were together for just over two months. Through the high, green heat of summer he was amazed by how intensely he loved her. He knew that while Leigh had traveled the world and read El Cid in Spanish, she had never before had great sex. He knew because her response shocked her as much as it pleased him. Though multilingual, she had not been multi-that-other-thing before John—and she told him so. Breathlessly, she said, “I thought there was only one to a customer.”