“Let me get on with it. Saturday afternoon. There were kids playing on the rocks below our balcony. I was talking about my boss, I don’t know why, and suddenly she said she’d seen him before the holiday. I asked her when. At least a week had passed. How long would it take your wife to tell you she’d seen your boss?”

“From the time she got in the door, a minute and thirty seconds. She’d say, ‘I gotta pee, then I got something to tell you.’”

“Right. But the way Maryellen did things, I figured I was supposed to drag it out of her. It was one of her little games to keep the attention focused on her. I asked her, ‘What did you talk about?’

“‘You, mostly.’

“‘What did you say?’

“‘Nothing bad about you, Frank. Don’t worry about it.’”

Levine laughed aloud. “What a lulu!” He caught himself. “You’re a lot older and wiser now, I hope.”

“I was in love with her. The good times were perfect. Seemed perfect. I kept hoping we’d find our way through. Not this time. I’d caught her in so many lies that I couldn’t be sure that she hadn’t pulled another damned stunt with Sid Levitt. That’s his name. Eileen says the first thing that goes is the memory. So I asked Maryellen again and got the same answer. When I asked her a third time, I got, ‘I don’t want to talk about it anymore. It’s not important.’ I even tried to live with that, but as I say, she’d already done too many other things.”

“Finish the story.”

“That Saturday, when we should have been watching the sunset, I couldn’t help coming back to what she might have said to Levitt. With her track record, she might have even gone out of her way to plant a lie. I told her I couldn’t live with what she had told me. She said that if I didn’t like it, I could get out. It wasn’t her father’s money that had paid for the place, it was mine. We lived on my income, had a nice apartment in Flushing, and unless she wanted something special, my salary paid the bills. For a two-hundred-dollar dress, she went to her father, who had always given her everything she wanted.”

“The only sure way to ruin a child for life,” Levine said.