Paula wasn’t having any of it. While she sometimes argued that it is up to the victim to define whether abuse has occurred, she took exception then. She asserted that Maggie was too young to judge the experience when it happened, and too warped by the experience to relate its effects accurately now. Paula likes to think she has an open mind. There was no way she was bending it to okay the Don-on-Maggie business.

Don kept arguing. He called Paula “Fluffy” again, and when she objected he told her to lighten up. He said he called lots of women Fluffy, and he only used the term for ladies he liked. As far as Paula was concerned, that added insult to injury. But she didn’t want to argue by email; that’s too easy to misread. And she sure didn’t want to go into it on the phone – angry awkward silences were not her thing. She didn’t want contention in person either. She kept the plane tickets, and she told herself she had no intention of flying to Texas to fight. After it all ended, she wondered why she retained the tickets and the plan.

And end it did, just two weeks after the Maggie memoir. By then their biographies had progressed into early adulthood. Paula was narrating the events that led to her accidental career and Don was about to report on how he came to marry his Berkeley girlfriend and why she changed her name. Paula had been interested in his memories so far, but she was sitting on the edge of her ethernet seat when it came to these subjects.

She booted up her computer on February 14 with some happy expectations. She looked forward to the chapter he owed her, and she’ll admit that she expected some romantic gesture from Don. Of course it wouldn’t be flowers or candy (she disdained cut plants and was on one of her diets anyway), but the man knew how to write mediocre verse and was clearly an accomplished flirt. For the first time in years, Paula had Valentine hopes.

She got something, and it was surprising, but it wasn’t pleasant. The only good thing Paula could say about it afterwards was that was the day she learned what the phrase “hopes dashed” meant. She got to feel her hopes dash.

Don’s email didn’t come to her till late afternoon. By then she was on the verge of disappointment anyway; he was two hours ahead of her and she’d expected a romantic communication by noon her time.

He wished her a happy Valentine’s Day. He apologized for not writing earlier. He excused his tardiness by telling her he’d spent the day in jail.

Of course there was more to it. And it was only city jail and a very bailable offense. He reported that, on arising and acknowledging February 14, he decided to start his day by fetching pastries and coffee for Rain. His wife. What?

His email continued. In his hurry to the bakery he ran into roads closed for a marathon, and a cop trying to detour him in a very roundabout way. He grew obstreperous. It was obvious to the reader that his obstreperousness was owing to stress from not yet telling his girlfriend that his estrangement from his wife wasn’t (or as he but it in the brief email argument, during the few days between his arrest and the cessation of their correspondence, “well yeah we have separate bedrooms, separate wings of the house really, but it’s not like an armed camp, fer chrissakes…”).

What symmetry. It won’t survive an editing session, but it’s the truth. Don’s wife bailed him out and Paula bailed on their relationship. It was all too clear to her. She saved their email printouts for a possible future book.

But she won’t go there. Paula reviewed those emails recently and she is mortified. It’s easy now for her to see how impossible the heroine’s situation was. She had too much money and comfort to thrive in Don’s fantasy arena. He’d just about perfected his solitary-man Hemingway image, at least ethereally, and nothing Paula could say or write would penetrate that persona. Don was comfortable by then with his failures, his heartburn, his cycles of depressed self-disdain. He was so accustomed to feeling low that he wouldn’t reach for any fruit that wasn’t already in his larder. He was immune to better feelings.

Paula didn’t have much from which to choose. It finally came down to hanging in with the Don dialogue and leasing from that a little attention, or closing the book that never got writ.