“I hate them sometimes,” he said, and laughed again. “I know you’re not supposed to say things like this, but I really do. At least they’re better than the fourth graders I used to have,” he went on. “Animals. Every last one of them.”

“But I thought—”

“You thought because it’s a private school that they’d be more civilized?”

I nodded.

“Even the Quakers. Please. Don’t get me started.”

Okay.

“Not that they’re the worst, of course. Catholics,” he said. “Now they’re the worst.”

“Oh.”

“I can say that because I’m Catholic.”

“Well Jews aren’t much better,” I offered. “I can say that because I’m Jewish.”

“Even though I’m not Jewish, I feel like I am. I think it’s because I lived in New York for so long. All that smoked fish. All those bagels.” He stopped a minute, out of respect, it seemed, for all the foods long gone. “I mean, can you find a decent bagel in Washington?”

I shook my head. “Don’t get me started.”

“Anyway,” he said, picking up where he’d left off before the rant, “it’s just that I came to realize that what I wanted most was a house and a yard.”

I sniffed, smelled a wife and kids.

“Wife and kids?” I asked, glancing reflexively but to no avail at the ring finger of his left hand (it was in his lap, hidden beneath a still-folded Wall Street Journal).

“No. Ex-girlfriend. Ex-fiancée, actually—Adrienne—and dog. She granted me full custody. It was an amicable separation. We’re still good friends, in fact.”

“Great!” I smiled disingenuously and turned back to my newspaper.

I had little tolerance for men who prided themselves on remaining close to their exes.

And even less tolerance for women with French-sounding names.

He seemed to sense my disapproval and backpedaled. “I mean, it’s not like we talk on the phone every day or anything. We’re just friendly, you know? We keep in touch. Every few months maybe, she’ll call. Or drop me a note. Sometimes I’ll email her a picture of the dog.”

“That’s nice. That’s admirable.” I tried for a third self-actualizing life-affirming compliment, but I was running out of lies.

“You think?” he said. He seemed relieved by my acceptance of his sensitive-man live-and-let-live “life choices.” Men could be such fools.

I cracked a thin sliver of ice between my back teeth. “May I speak frankly now, too?”

He smiled. “Please.”

“No.”

“Really.” He looked crushed, disappointed, then waited for me to continue.

We’d begun our initial descent. The plane banked left, then right, then left again. I felt nauseous. Afraid of plunging, wing first, into the Potomac. Or was it the Tidal Basin? The geography of Washington—physical and otherwise—was still not clear to me.

“Look,” I said, dismissively, “I don’t even know you. It’s none of my business whether you maintain an inappropriate or unhealthy closeness with your ex-girlfriend—or ex-fiancée—or not.” Frond-speak. Channeled from the great beyond.

What on earth was I talking about?

“It’s not inappropriate. Or unhealthy.” He looked wounded, confused. In retrospect, of course, this was entirely justified.