Page 62

"Of course not. Mai was always unpredictable. It was what I liked and didn't like about her." he said.

"How can you be so contradictory about that, especially with someone you supposedly loved?"

He looked at me, those beautiful eyes turning darker as his face became serious.

"There's a little contradiction in every romance, and especially in every marriage. Each person has to give up something he or she wants. That's

compromise. For Mai, it would have had to have been sacrificing some of her impetuosity, her

unpredictability. She hated being tied down by any set of rules, and she took great pleasure in being outrageous, whether by defying style or etiquette or her lover's wishes."

He laughed.

"She drove around in her new sports car without putting on her license plates for the longest time. She was stopped three times by the Palm Beach police. She kept getting tickets. and I kept settling them. The fourth time, the patrolman was prepared and had a screwdriver. He put them on himself. I loved her for her carefree, wild ways, but I grew annoyed and tired of it as well."

"But you gave her an engagement ring, didn't you?"

"I gave it to her, but she didn't wear it. She took it and promised she would eventually. Sometimes, she put it on before we went out, but before the evening ended, she usually had it off."

"She was teasing you."

"I think she was teasing herself. maybe challenging herself." he said. "At times. I felt like a bystander, observing, waiting on the sidelines.' He looked at me. "Talk about your split personalities. I never knew which Mai Stone I was picking up, and sometimes didn't know until the evening was nearly ended. She made surprise into a career."

"You must have been very much in love with her to put up with all that."

"I thought so, but now I'm not so sure I wasn't simply putting myself through some form of torture." "Why would you do that?" I asked.

To cleanse my soul of all my previous romantic sins." he said without a beat of hesitation. his eyes back to twinkling impishly.

"I'll bet." I said. "That's the first thing you said that I believe." He roared and drove on.

"You should take Bunny up on her offer. There's a computer you can use in my home office. I don't really use it much. The office is adjacent to my bedroom in what I like to call the Far Eastern wing of the estate. Besides it being on the east end. the furniture is all Oriental in style.-

"Talk about surprises. The house is full of them," I said.

"What do you mean?"

"Bunny told me Grace Montgomery was seduced in the room I would have."

"That's the legend."

"You don't believe it?"

"I don't know," he said. shaking his head. "Exaggerations are like an indigenous crop here. People harvest and spread them like jam and pass them around... like that campfire game, what's it called? You know, where someone begins by whispering a secret, and it gets passed along, exaggerated. changed, until it arrives at the end, almost entirely different from what it was at the beginning."

"I don't know that game," I said.

He raised those skeptical eyebrows again. "Oh? How come?"

"My father taught me how to hold onto the truth." I said softly.

He gazed at me a moment and then looked ahead and said in a soft tone of voice. "Before you leave, please teach me how that's done."

We were both strangely quiet for nearly the remainder of the trip back to The Breake

rs.

I shouldn't feel so different, so peculiar about myself and life, I thought. Everyone, no matter how well-to-do, how successful in life. carries the burden of some heavy secret or secrets.