“How many do you want, doll? I’m in no hurry.”

“Oh…John…is everyone this good at this?”

“No,” he told her, kissing every place he could think of. “Just me with you—it’s the only combination that works this good.”

“Well,” she corrected. He didn’t hear.

The true meaning of arrogance, John discovered, was believing you were the cause of another person’s passion or pleasure. He believed he had invented sex for Leigh. She could paint and sculpt, but he had been the first man to undress her outside, beside the lake, and rock with her on a floating dock.

Around the first of August, just as John was beginning to believe he could not live without her, a series of events conspired to tear them apart. In retrospect, he could see that it was nothing but lousy luck that arrived before he was ready to deal with it.

First, Max Brackon had a heart attack and Leigh went to him. Though it didn’t change the facts of the divorce and she returned to Durango in less than a week, it exacerbated John’s jealousy and fear that he wasn’t smart enough to be loved by her. It made him irritable, unfair and critical. He began to find things seriously wrong with being in love with a genius.

One—she had very few practical skills, having been told by a quorum of professors throughout her life that she had more to offer the world than her skill at cleaning and cooking. She should exercise her cerebellum and let someone else do the drudge work. She could, therefore, theorize and build a microwave oven, but she couldn’t cook vegetables in one.

“That’s just plain lazy,” said John. Perhaps he raised his voice.

“I am not lazy,” she replied, just as hotly. “You can’t call someone who has three degrees and gets a Ph.D. by twenty-three lazy.”

“I thought it was just a master’s,” he replied.

“That was at twenty-one.”

Two—she obviously thought that because of her higher than average IQ, she had higher than average needs and should be indulged. Whenever they began to talk about never being apart, she naturally assumed they would go wherever she went. “What can I do in Durango?” she had asked. “I’ll have to go somewhere where I can be challenged. Boredom terrifies me more than anything. I have an offer from UCLA to work on a design for a newborn CAT scan device that can be used to detect a predisposition for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. You could come to L.A.”

“And do lawns?” he asked. “While you win the Nobel Prize in scientific discoveries? Maybe I should clean pools.”

“You could do anything you like,” she replied, not understanding him or his ego problem. “I would be happy to support you financially. It would be no problem.”