‘About eight months.’

‘I attended the service for him. I don’t recall that you were there,’ said Madge.

‘I couldn’t make it.’

‘A few months before he passed away, I had lunch with him. He was no longer his handsome self. Not just his health was bad. He was generally in terrible shape. There was a bad smell from his clothes, his teeth weren’t clean, and when he tried to do the charm smile he used to do, that deliberate lift of his upper lip, it was a failure. He said he stopped practicing law a year ago.’

‘More like three years,’ said Amy. ‘He spent his time around the Michigan Avenue bookshops. He had unpaid bills there, and he wasn’t welcome. And the customers didn’t want to hear him quoting his favorite poets. This went back to our school days. He memorized bits to recite when he was putting the make on girls. After we were married, I looked up all his source books. The passages were underlined, and just from Chapter One. He never read an entire book in his whole life. Here is a sample: “The face of man is the most amazing thing in the life of the world. Another world shines through it. It is the entrance of personality into the world process, with its uniqueness, its unrepeatability. Through the face we apprehend, not the bodily life of a man, but the life of his soul.” One of his favorite Russians said that. When we were dating, he repeated this as his own.’

‘He knew better than to lay such shit on me,’ said Madge. ‘Who wrote it?’

‘Underlined with a ruler, in red. Just Chapter One. The rest he never looked at.’

‘Pretty tricky.’

‘Pretending to be an intellectual, for purposes of seduction. Like an item from Playboy. Coaching young men on how to weave the web.’

‘But you memorized those words yourself.’

‘I did do it, didn’t I?’

‘Well, the last time I saw him, it was clear that he was going, going, gone,’ said Madge. ‘There was only one interest in his life, and he had to give that up. So it was time to leave. That was when he turned weak and gentle. I was sorry to see him on the skids. He spoke intimately …’

As soon as she said ‘intimately,’ Amy knew all too well what Madge was about to get at: Jay had told her about the tapes.

‘The evidence against me, well, he had me dead to rights,’ said Amy. ‘So don’t feel too privileged. He played those tapes to everybody who would listen to them. What he had done was to hire an agency. He gave them a key to the apartment. That’s how it was set up. The specialists bugged my phone for months. Even the bed was bugged. There were microphones in the mattress. All this evidence was played in chambers for the judge. Jay made the perfect adultery case against me …’

Amy had become all too familiar with the expression she saw on Madge’s face. She had seen it in others – a sidelong, oblique look of amusement, appearing on the half-averted cheek.