Since the first meeting with Gimel & Hines four months earlier, they’d been interested. He’d shown three editors maybe 5,000 very early, rough words then. He said he’d be ready to show them true work product in about ten months. But they’d called and written several times that summer. He’d faxed them about 15,000 close to finished words a couple of weeks earlier and the work was sold. It had been the moment he wanted her to share. He didn’t care that Kenny had negotiated an advance, enough to live on for a couple of years. He didn’t much care about the acclaim at Hamilton’s, or even Kenny’s out of character and extraordinarily ingenuous praise. He had only wanted her to know. Until the hiatus she’d reviewed the manuscript every week, given him new insight and direction.

He had the slim thought that she’d call back, but knew, in reality, she wouldn’t. He clearly couldn’t break the rule. If nothing else, he could break the rule or the promise. But he’d jump when the phone rang and check his several voice mails almost incessantly. Even his quotes were platitudes, “A watched pot never boils,” was about all he could think of. No erudition here. No style. His walks during the day became more frequent. He wondered always what she was thinking. Was she trying to get back to him? Or had Michael made the right moves? Could she get back to him in time? What did “in time” mean? He wondered how long he’d love her. There were fewer answers now.

And then came the cynicism. It was a vile suspicion that made him angry with himself. He was never angry at himself for being a fool. He did become furious at stupidity, particularly when it became his trait. He believed it was his now.

He should have known it was over when she left L.A. Hell, she told him as much when she talked of “getting” her third husband by marrying then divorcing him. He should have seen it. She set him up good, better than any grifter or scheme he’d ever investigated. “Essentially, I’m a stupid man,” he recalled from Islands in the Stream. Crap, not even good Hemingway. It was flabby Hemingway, like him.

But he loved her. Every now and then he’d try not to. He’d walk around Santa Monica or Brentwood surveying women. The results of the poll were always the same: There was never one who could compare to Maggie. He knew what he was feeling and he knew he had to go through it. It was all the dark alleys, all the high cliffs, all the hurricanes and all the high surf there was. You had to go through it. She was right. In the past he’d always run. He always had an exit. He kept one tiny exit in all his strategies. There was none now. Sure, he could have fashioned an out. He’d been a magician all his life and outs were important to the craft. He probably had the energy to do it, but not the inclination, not in the slightest.

Maggie had been right that night at the Bel Air. He was trying to run away from her. She didn’t know it then, but she was trying to run toward him. Another fuckup, he thought. He knew, ever so faintly, that the hiatus they’d reached that night and the following day was the only chance they had. But it was so distant it was hard to touch.

There remained no question of his love for her. None. It was the remarkable calm about him, that was problematic, as the stress point in his back had gone. He felt nothing but his love, no anxiety, no physical tightness.

For eight months his only control had been patience. He was learning this endurance in an elemental tutorial, minute by minute and it was a constant process, one that had filled him up. One that had filled him up so there was little room for anything else. His refuge at the driving range and on the golf course lost all appeal; and his sanctuary at Hamilton’s had seemed more of a catacomb than a retreat.

Progress on the book had been alright, but it slowed without her gentle discussions and comments. The rewriting was difficult and the ideas weren’t flowing as they had. And, he had partial pages due in three months. A regrouping was in order, but he hadn’t a clue as to how.

On a gray and quiet Saturday morning he surfed through the channels on television and stopped. It was about nine in the morning when he realized he’d been watching an international ping pong championship for two hours, poured himself a scotch and got into the Jacuzzi wearing jeans.

The deliberation with no breakfast or coffee and a huge scotch, sitting in a 104° Jacuzzi fully dressed early in the morning could be called deliberation led him to believe he was on the verge, but didn’t know what the hell a verge was. He couldn’t bring himself to be on a precipice, because it would be trite.

It all mattered and probably didn’t as he rehashed the past few months. He had, occasionally held back questions he had, as he knew the last thing she needed was more pressure. Probably wrong, he thought, not unethical, just wrong, as it all turned out. Maybe not wrong, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered either way, as things were turning out.

The ball was started with Allison, who now had an army of The Ecclesia circled about her tendering advice on the divorce at every turn. To ensure the advice would be forthcoming with all the force of Secretariat pissing, she’d signed up for at least three advanced courses which would be completed maybe by the millenium and far surpassed in cost the total of Stanley’s bar bills for the past 30 years.

Stanley had figured it wrong, of course. The Ecclesia preached forgiveness and making amends. What he didn’t figure on was that this ostensibly pacific group also engaged in cross and upselling better than the worst of the boiler rooms he’d exposed as a reporter. They wanted consistent attendance and the attendant cash. Their disciples, all paying heavily, would be happy to join Allison in the fray.

So the worst of the worst happened and Allison had picked up a couple of second rate jackleg lawyers from the group to help her. He thought he could orchestrate the divorce rather quietly and amicably, but for all his conducting skills, he couldn’t make it work. Trying to conserve cash, he was dealing with these lawyers himself but found that trying to talk sense to a box of stones was a bit wearing. The stress was there now. Maggie was gone, the writing was there, but she was gone and his life seemed to be moving automatically. He had thought often that were Maggie in the picture, it would have been some respite, more than that as she had always calmed him, the Bel Air night notwithstanding.