rnold told me he wished he could be with me tonight. He was stuck at a party, hiding in the coatroom. The hosts of the party were old friends of his—fellow travelers from back in the Red Scare days. The husband now owned a fur shop in Beverly Hills; the wife was a big supporter of Israel. He didn’t mention if E and her husband were in attendance, or if his own wife, who must have been wondering where her husband had gone, was nearby.

He must have been wondering where my mother was. Phone cords in those days rarely reached past twelve feet.

I began to cry, but with restraint, so as not to alarm my mother, who was listening on the far side of the love beads. But a teenage girl who has been stood up on New Year’s Eve by her steady can rarely maintain restraint.

His response to my hysterical tears was to break up with me. For my sake. He didn’t want me to spend another New Year’s Eve crying.

I cried harder.

Between sobs, I put it to him this way: Why wouldn’t he just tell E and his wife that he had fallen in love with someone else? I did not say, with another woman. I did not yet think of myself as a woman.

I might not have thought of myself as the “other woman,” but I suspect that was a choice on my part. I wasn’t ready to give up the benefits of youth. I had only begun to appreciate the shifting power of a thirty-year age gap, how the king can abruptly become the queen’s pawn. I gave him two weeks to break up with his wife and E—or else. Then I hung up on him and repeated my ultimatum to my mother. She looked both stunned and terrified.

“Or else what?” my mother asked.