stop nagging me. I said no ten times before I said yes.”
“Addiction or no addiction, wouldn’t a guy want to speak privately to a counselor about his sex life?” I asked.
Margot said, “We’re not going for that. We’re going supposedly to find”—air quotes—“peace and harmony. And you know what would help? If the guy hypnotizes me so I leave with marital amnesia.”
“Wanna know what I think?” asked Anthony.
“I know what you think,” said Margot.
“I don’t,” I said.
Anthony patted my hand. “It’s my belief that Charles is looking for peace and harmony, all right . . . in his ex-wife’s bed.”
Margot rose. Did she look offended? Not at all. She yawned and stretched rather grandly. Body language translation? You might be correct.
I reminded her, on what we were calling our daily constitutional now that the weather had inched into the sixties, that she was still dating Roy.
“Roy? Here’s the trouble with Roy: He doesn’t have a red cent. It’s no longer cute.”
“But you’ve known that from the start. And it’s not as if you have much in the way of disposable income, either.”
“I know! But I have the apartment. And my alimony. And my fabulous boarders. I don’t feel as poor as I actually am.”
I said, “I’ve never thought of you as someone who needed a rich boyfriend.”
“Rich? I didn’t say rich. I don’t need rich.” We were passing a market with fruit and vegetables displayed outside. An aproned young man was tossing out the old, the yellowed, and the overripe. “But would I like to stop picking up every check for two cups of coffee and two glasses of wine? Yes.”
“I guess the question is, do you like him anyway?”
Instead of answering, she asked the vegetable guy in pantomime if she could have the cabbage leaves he was paring off and presumably discarding. He handed her a plastic bag with a wave of the hand that said Help yourself.
She said with a grin, “Sopa, sí?”
“Sopa,” he answered with an instant grin indicating some happy recovered soup memory.
That was so Margot. You could call it good manners or friendliness, but really it was charm. “Cómo se llama?” she asked him.
“Mañuel.”
“Gracias, Mañuel.”
He offered two bruised tomatoes, but she said, “No mas! Gracias.” I knew she had exhausted her Spanish, which was limited to the vocabulary of menus and amenities, but still she’d won a friend.
After our adioses and a few blocks in silence, I asked, “Isn’t it going to be hard to break it off with Roy after you’ve been sleeping together?”
Margot said, “Not that hard.” She nudged me with her elbow. “Especially since I haven’t heard from him in a while. Tomorrow it’ll be two weeks.”
“Does that hiatus have something to do with Charles?”
“I am not admitting any interest in Charles. Nada.”
And then the question I’d been waiting for an opportune moment to ask: “How did it go today with Dr. Sadler?”
She headed for a bus-stop bench and I followed. “I was dying for you to ask! I enjoyed every minute. It was ladies first, so Sadler asked for a little history and what brought us there today. So I had the floor for the whole time! Of course, everyone thinks that appointment number two is Charles’s turn.”
“But it’s not?”
“I only agreed to go once, remember?”
“But wouldn’t it be fair to go for one more?”
A bus had pulled up and was waiting after two passengers disembarked. Margot yelled, “We’re just sitting. Thanks!” She slid closer on the bench. “You think I need to be fair?”
Reflexively, I said “No.” But then, “It depends. Do you want things to get better? I don’t mean a reconciliation. Just working toward . . . something more comfortable.”
“Oh, it’s plenty comfortable,” she said. “More than I saw coming.”
Should I request amplification? Betsy would. Anthony would, too. So I asked, “Have you slept with Charles since he got out of prison? You can tell me. I won’t be judgmental. I know that kind of thing happens.”
She said, “I’ve thought of it. He’s thought of it every night for the past—as he likes to put it—ninety-nine weeks. You’d think he’d been marking days off in chalk on his cell wall.”
I asked if she thought she’d have to forgive him in order to take him back into her bed.
When she didn’t answer, I said, “I won’t be shocked either way.”
“Do I think what he did was forgivable? No. But is he sorry? Extremely sorry? Insanely sorry? Yes. Do I have flashbacks about the good times? Yes. Do I think