“You look happy,” I say to Guy, even though he suddenly looks positively miserable.

“Oh, I am. Like I’ve never been before.”

“Where are you going to live?”

“She has a small house. Nothing fancy. A sofa, a table, a mattress on the floor.”

“A mattress on the floor?”

He gives a boyish half grin that makes me want to smash him in the face. He reads my expression, and the grin dies. “You don’t approve,” he says.

“It’s not up to me to approve or disapprove, is it? I’m only trying to understand what you’re doing.”

“I’ve decided to change my life.”

I snap my fingers. “Just like that.”

“I don’t have a choice. I love her, Victor. What else is there to understand? I’m sick in love with her.”

And just then he looks it, sick in love, as if love were an illness that he has caught, an exotic virus that was biding its time in the nuclei of his cells until it burst forth to ravage him.

“Well, that’s great, Guy,” I say, “just great. I’m glad for you. Really.”

I take a sip of my Sea Breeze and I am suffused with the bitter aftertaste of disappointment. But is it with Guy, with what he is going to do to his wife and his children and the image I had held of his happy, happy family, or is it because he hasn’t brought her to this restaurant for me?

When she returns, the conversation is awkward, charmless, wryless. There is no longer flirtation in the air. Guy talks, I listen, Hailey smokes. But at the end, as we part and say our good-byes, in a moment while Guy looks away, I am staring once again at her lips when they silently mouth “Call me,” and I do.

WE MEET for a drink after work. Nothing secret or surreptitious, we are in the open, in a public place, the bar of a famous restaurant where Guy could march in at any time, but he won’t. Even so, he is with us, as real a presence as the man with the toupee and the flowered tie sitting two stools down. Hailey drinks an Absolut martini, I drink my usual Sea Breeze. The man with the toupee drinks Scotch. Hailey’s eyes are bluer than I remember, her lips freshly lacquered and in constant motion, hovering uneasily just beneath a smile. I can’t take my eyes off them, they are devouring.

“I have a client that might be facing criminal charges,” she says. “I wondered if you wanted to handle the case.”

“So this is a business meeting.”

“What did you think it was?” Her words are accusatory, but her smile is anything but. It feels like a seduction, but I wonder who is seducing whom.

“I thought we were going to talk about Guy,” I say.

“No we weren’t.”

“You’re going to destroy him, aren’t you?”

“And that would concern you?”

“He’s my friend.”

“And that’s why you’re here, having a drink with me, because he’s your friend?”

“You phrase questions like a psychiatrist, not a lawyer.”

“Objection noted. Answer the question.”

“There you go. Fine deposition form.”

“You’re not here having a drink with me because Guy is your friend, are you, Mr. Carl?”

“No.”

“Good. At least that’s settled.”

“Is it so easy?”

“Yes, yes it is.”

And she is right.

WE COURT like Victorians, slowly, chastely. The strange omnipresence of Guy is our chaperon. He is always there, the guy with the afro, the guy in the tweed suit, the guy cross-dressing who thinks we can’t tell. He is always there, and his presence lets us pretend that we want only to be friends. Merely friends. That is all. Isn’t it obvious?

There are more drinks in the twilight. She crosses her legs and we bump knees. Just the thought of her turns me blue, but she won’t let me kiss her. She says that nothing can ever happen, that she is devoted to Guy. Her admonitions allow me to assuage any guilt that our meetings are other than innocent, but when she crosses her legs, we bump knees.

On nights when Guy is busy, we have dinner. She orders fish but barely eats a thing. She drinks more than she ought and smokes when she drinks. Mostly what we do is talk. We talk of incidental things, our cases, our tastes in movies. She is not one for weepy chick flicks. She likes action-adventure, she likes explosions. Arnold. John Woo. She has a longing for Sylvester Stallone.

“Whatever happened to him?” I ask.

“He tried to get serious.”

“Is that fatal?”

“Always.”

“You’ve never been serious?” I say.

“I didn’t say that. But whenever I’ve been serious, I’ve been seriously bad.”

“You exaggerate.”

“No, no I don’t.”

“Tell me about it, tell me the worst.”

“Are you a priest? I could only tell a priest.”

“I didn’t know you were religious.”

“I’m not, and that’s why. So I never have to tell.”

“It’s not that bad, I’m sure.”

“That’s sweet of you. Or dim of you. One or the other. Which is it?”

“Sweet?”

“Too bad. There is nothing more appealing sometimes than an utter lack of imagination.”

“Has Guy moved in yet?”

“Oh, yes. Yes he has.”

“How is it, living with Guy?”

“Like a dream.”

“You sound overwhelmed with joy.”

“I never knew bliss could feel this way.”

She has no sense of humor, but she laughs well. She is a grand audience, she is Ed McMahon if Ed McMahon wore a size four. I make wisecracks, and she pretends they are funnier than they really are, and I let her. We tell stories of our childhoods and treat them like revelations, when all they are are stories culled to hide the revelations. I tell her how my mother left when I was still in my boyhood, how she now lives with some alcoholic cowboy in Arizona. I tell her how my father still cuts lawns even with half a lung. She tells me of the tragic death of her father.

This is what I learn of her past, the bones of her life as she relates them to me. She was born in West Virginia, on the western edge of the Appalachian Mountains. Her daddy was a Cajun who came north looking for work in the lumber mills. They went to church every Sunday, had a house with a verandah on the high side of the river. She walked to school with her sister, came home to a plate of cookies and milk each afternoon, played in the park across from the courthouse. She was eight when a load of timber came loose during stacking and crushed her father to death.

There was no pension, no payout. He had been working all those years as an independent contractor. There was insurance, but barely enough for the burial. Her mother worked, but even so, things grew very hard very quickly and although she was still only a child at the time, in all her years after, she never forgot the bitter taste of financial desperation. In order to help out, her mother’s brother moved in and joined his wages with his sister’s. No family of his own, a drinker and gambler, her uncle settled down long enough to help raise the family. Eight years he lived with them, until the strain became too much and he disappeared, presumably to start again with the drinking and the gambling. But by then his job was complete, the girls were almost grown.

Hailey was popular, pretty, a prom queen who walked the high school halls arm in arm with the star halfback. Awarded a church scholarship, she left home to attend a small college in Maryland, and for the first time she concentrated more on her studies than on her social life. To her great surprise she discovered that she was good at academics. Dean’s-list good. Good enough for the church scholarship to be extended to graduate school if she wanted to attend, and she did. She never forgot what had happened to her father and family, never forgot how an unfair contract and unsafe conditions had left her family on the brink. It was that experience, she told me, that had sent her into the law, and when she said it, there was none of the ironic tone that normally left you looking for the explanatory footnotes. A law school in New Jersey gave her enough aid so that with the scholarship and loans she could make a go of it. Three years later she landed an associate’s position with a small but profitable plaintiff’s firm in Philadelphia. Four years after that, when an affair with the managing partner created a scandal, she took a stack of files and went out on her own.