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'Oh, it's very hard,' Clare says, sitting down slowly and not too close. 'Oh, I miss him so much. I didn't know. I didn't know that I would be like this, that this is what happens when you love someone like that. I had no idea. No one says, there's no happy ending at all. No one says, if you could …

'So,' she said. 'You've been married thirty-five years. Well, look, Dr Langford -- '

[...]

'[...] It's like this. Unless your wife is doing crack cocaine or having sex with young girls and barnyard animals, what little you have will be split fifty/fifty.'

In 1974, in the last year of his New York life, when Barbra -- who was twenty-nine, worked in the Wall Street office as his secretary and smoked Dunhills which she kept in a cigarette holder, triple facts that made her desirable to Haffner as he passed middle age -- asked him why it was he still we…

Was it too late for him to change? To undergo one final metamorphosis? I am not what I am! That was Haffner's constant wish, his mantra. He was a man replete with mantras. He would not act his age, or his Age. He would not be what others made of him.

And yet; and yet.

MG: Oh yes. One thing is, men don’t know how women talk when they’re together, just as we really don’t know how men talk among themselves. You have to rather intuit it from something the man will let drop. And you’ll think, ‘Oh, so they do gossip.’

JL: People often ask me a question I find ridic…